Tag Archives: programming languages

Type theory

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 […]

Doing generality right

Many software developers, while making a tool to solve a specific problem, heed the siren call of generality. By making a few specific changes, they can turn the tool into a general framework for solving a larger class of problems. And then, with a few more changes, an even larger class of problems, and so […]

Overloading words in research and programming

In research and academia, one of the fundamental activities is the invention and subsequent examination of new concepts. For concepts, we need names. One way of making a name is stringing words together until the meaning is sufficiently specific. E.g. “morphism averse co-dependent functor substitutions in virtual machine transmigration systems”. Thus the abstruse academic research […]

A wikipedia of algorithms

Here’s something I’ve wanted to see for some time, but probably don’t have time to work on myself. It would be nice if there was a wikipedia-like web site for code and algorithms. Just the common ones to start with, but perhaps more specialised ones over time. Of course the algorithms should be available in […]

Where is Java going?

Today, Java is one of the most popular programming languages. Introduced in 1995, it rests on a tripod of the language itself, its libraries, and the JVM. In the TIOBE programming language league charts, it has been at the top for as long as the measurements have been made (since 2002), overtaken by C only […]