From the files of the ECMAScript TC39 proceedings Single export refers to a design pattern where a module identifier is overloaded to also represent a function or type inside the module. As far as I can tell, the term “single export” is not particularly widely used outside the ECMAScript TC39 committee; however, the idea shows [...]
From the files of the ECMAScript TC39 proceedings I want to talk about an interesting duality pointed out by Mark Miller between two otherwise different language features: weak maps and private symbols. Modulo implementation differences, they are the same thing! A weak map is an ordinary associative map, with the twist that if the key [...]
If you hang out long enough with a certain crowd (in my case, it was the ECMAScript TC39 committee), you will probably hear the term membrane tossed around. And eventually, you will start to wonder, “Well, what is a membrane, anyway?” As is the case with many clever but simple ideas, membranes were first introduced [...]
Caveat emptor: half-baked research ideas ahead. What is a monad? One answer is that it is a way of sequencing actions in a non-strict language, a way of saying “this should be executed before that.” But another answer is that it is programmable semicolon, a way of implementing custom side-effects when doing computation. These include [...]
One of the most mind-bending features of the untyped lambda calculus is the fixed-point combinator, which is a function fix with the property that fix f == f (fix f). Writing these combinators requires nothing besides lambdas; one of the most famous of which is the Y combinator λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x)). Now, [...]
Robert Harper has (somewhat) recently released a pre-print of a book (PDF) that he has been working on, Practical Foundations for Programming Languages. I downloaded a copy when it initially came out, but I was guilty of putting off actually digging into the book’s 590-some pages. It was only until Harper successfully baited me with [...]
The holy grail of web application development is a single language which runs on both the server side and the client side. The reasons for this are multifarious: a single language promotes reuse of components that no longer need to be reimplemented in two languages and allows for much more facile communication between the server [...]
Ur is a programming language, which among other things, has a rather interesting record system. Record systems are a topic of rather intense debate in the Haskell community, and I noticed that someone had remarked “[Ur/Web has a http://www.impredicative.com/ur/tutorial/tlc.html very advanced records system]. If someone could look at the UR implementation paper and attempt to [...]