What you should know about type systems
I read today, a really good essay on type systems. It covers what they can be used for and the differences between dynamic and static systems (although the word ‘type’ is used in both, it doesn’t mean the same thing…
Strong Typing for Security
I got into a mild argument about static vs. dynamic typing. I recognize that static typing can be verbose to the point of being repetitious. Take Java generics for example: List<String> astr = new ArrayList<String>();List<String> astr = new ArrayList<String>(); There…
The Future of Publishing should be Skribilo
Finally, I found something that looks like it could suitably replace LaTeX! It’s called Skribilo and features all of the goodness observed in a previous post about using a Lisp-like syntax instead of that crufty HTML/XML nonsense.
A language should be focused on writing Internal DSLs
I’ve been reading Martin Fowler’s book, Domain-Specific Languages, this weekend. He covered a number of ways in which you can structure your code to achieve what he terms an Internal DSL. Quite a bit is focused on the discussion of…
Considerations of Programming Language Design
Reddit modded up a nice review of Considerations When Designing your Own Programming/Scripting Language (it’s worth following the links provided there to Clementson’s Blog, to get a larger picture of the issue). There’s really a ton of stuff to think…
Method Extensions
I’ve come across another programming language feature that I would like to have. The last one was a bit outlandish, and I’d really like to refine it a bit. Dress it up a little. Supposing you were asked to perform…
The Future of the Web should be Lisp
I was reading Steve Yegge’s drunken rant on The Emacs Problem. It wasn’t able to convince me that Lisp was a great language for text processing, but it did convince me that Lisp is a fantastic language for data interchange….
Cultural and Linguistic Sexism
I was working on a paper today, and noticed some very peculiar about linguistic gender-neutrality. I know that we are all encouraged to use female character in our examples to combat the inherent chauvinism of the English language. Despite following…
Building Linguistic Structure
Yesterday, I had an interesting thought. My advisor once made the cultural observation that many people in Computer Science invent their own language and then immediately write a self-hosting compiler. I agree that a compiler is quite a feat of…
Computer Language Comparison
Guillaume Marceau has used data from the Computer Language Benchmark Game to provide a graphical comparison of many different languages. If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose…