Tag Archives: code

Piety, self-examination and the purification of software

This writer is not a believer in Christianity. However, I am interested in trying to understand the history of and heritage from Christianity, as it is a major component of Western culture. Of particular interest to me is the heritage from protestantism, which also happens to be the official religion of Sweden, the society that […]

Complex data: its origin and aesthetics

Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of the complexity of data. It is simple to define but appears to have deep implications. The K. complexity of a string is defined as the size of the simplest possible program, with respect to a given underlying computer, that can generate the data. For example, the string “AAAAAA” has lower […]

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 […]

Why Scala? (2) Compact syntax applied to probabilistic actions

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 […]

Why Scala? The mixing of imperative and functional style

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 […]