One of the most interesting things I’ve been studying in the past year has been type theory. I feel that type theory is an area where a lot of separate fields can come together in a good design. In strongly typed languages, language implementation efficiency, syntax and language semantics all leave essential marks in the [...]
As a little fun project, I developed some probabilistic cellular automata with Scala and very basic AWT graphics. I continue to become more proficient with Scala, and it feels increasingly natural to use. During this exercise I came up with something that I thought was particularly elegant, and that I am pretty sure would have [...]
Scala is a little wonderland sprinkled with useful things you can mix and match as you like to improve your coding experience while staying on the Java platform. The Option classes, the structural case matching, the compact declarations, lazy evaluation… the list goes on. But at the heart of it is the decision to mix [...]
The Scala collections library (in version 2.7.7) has a MultiMap trait for mutable collections, but none for immutable ones. I hacked something up to use while waiting for an official version. I’m finding this to work well, but I don’t have much experience with collections design, so it’s likely to have some flaws. Also, this [...]
Programming languages are more about people and less about machines. Programming languages are about staying inside the limitations of people’s minds and their ability to keep track of and work with abstractions. If people had no such limitations, they could code in assembly language all the time. Programming languages and supporting tools and environments are [...]
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