A Tower of Simple Systems

I posted this on Future Programming at Quora : A Tower of Simple Systems Re-reading the answer I reposted here a couple of days ago about the “Holy Grail” of programming language design : modification. https://www.quora.com/q/qqylyzqgpwisoecc/What-is-the-Holy-Grail-of-programming-language-design So here’s a question. A dumb solution … But what if we created a system as a tower of …

August is Patterning Month

August is Patterning month again. I’m back to work on the Patterning library. And, in particular, getting it working properly in the ClojureScript, in-browser version. I’m going to be using devcards, figwheel, spec and other good tools in the Clojure community. I’ll be revamping the site and new versions of the code. Watch this space …

Welcome to 2015 (part 2)

Bloody hell! I just wrote a blog post and WordPress lost it. Grrrr … The short resume was : yes, I’m late (Feb) continuing my “Welcome to 2015” blog posts. last year I got the functional programming bug. Haskell is pretty damned good, but I’ve fallen for Clojure because a) dynamic types, b) Lisp syntax(lessness), …

What's Special About Dynamically Typed FP?

The magic of Functional Programming is that you can write the verbs before the nouns. You have so little commitment to what the data structures are, that it doesn’t get in the way. Today I find myself mapping across and diff-ing lists of arbitrary ad-hoc dictionaries and tuples. Had I sat down and had to …

Clojure

OK. Consider me won over. Lisp is great to work with. The things that grabbed me about FP in Erlang and Haskell (pattern-matching arguments, partial application, lazy evaluation) are all here. My code is as concise as Erlang and damned nearly as concise as Haskell (I think the line count is similar though the number …

Wolfram Language

I’m impressed. Beyond being just a grab-bag of libraries (which it could have been) it seems there’s real thinking about composability here. The laziness of evaluation, the “symbolic-ness” makes it a powerful functional programming language. In fact, it’s almost a “data-flow” language. Of the kind, like Yahoo Pipes, which can become an orchestrator of web-level …

NoSQL and the Tar Pit

In a Quora answer I went back to a theme that I mentioned when discussing Bret Victor a few months ago. Here’s something that struck me yesterday when reading Out of the Tar Pit which is a very good essay that seems to signal the direction that many smart people think software development should be …

Programming Language Features for Large Scale Software

My Quora Answer to the question : What characteristics of a programming language makes it capable of building very large-scale software? The de facto thinking on this is that the language should make it easy to compartmentalize programming into well segregated components (modules / frameworks) and offers some kind of “contract” idea which can be …