Will has the potential to be turned into a fundamental concept through which ethics, epistemology, art, life and politics might be understood. How can we define the idea of will? I’m sure I’ll find a lot of answers to this in the philosophical literature in time (maybe I should read Schopenhauer). But what I came [...]
(The multi-month hiatus here on Monomorphic has been due to me working on my thesis. I am now able to, briefly, return to this and other indulgences.) Life presupposes taking responsibility. It presupposes investing people, objects and matters around you with your concern. In particular, democratic society presupposes that we all take full, in some [...]
I’m in Portland, Oregon for the SPLASH conference. There’s a lot of energy and good ideas going around. I gave a talk about my project, Poplar, at the FREECO workshop. At the same workshop there was a very interesting talk given by Klaus Ostermann, outlining some of the various challenges facing software composition. He linked [...]
New programming languages are released all the time. History is littered with dead ones. There are also many long time survivors in good shape, as well as geriatric languages on life support. What makes a programming language attractive and competitive? How can we evaluate its quality? There are many different aspects of this problem. Ease [...]
It is likely that few features cause as much problems as pointers and references in statement-oriented languages, such as C, C++ and Java. They are powerful, yes, and they allow us to control quite precisely how a program is to represent something. We can use them to conveniently compose objects and data without the redundancy [...]
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