I got to visit the Stasi museum in Berlin this week, and it gave me a newfound appreciation for why it’s important to resist surveillance. Interestingly, surveillance is not exclusively limited to one kind of government: it can appeal to both left- and right-wing governments, and corporations in the digital age use surveillance to make money. In every form, surveillance is evil and must be resisted.
...We’re going to be writing a BF compiler for a class I’m in. Last night I threw together a little interpreter for the program in about an hour; it doesn’t do input—that should be easy to add—but it’s enough to handle some benchmarks for the language, albeit slowly. You can see my repository on Codeberg for the source code.
I needed one function to do two closely related jobs—the logic was identical, but some parameters needed to change. Fortunately, first-class functions in your language make it trivial to parameterize your programs in elegant ways.
...I started using the Zsh a few years ago and I’ve liked its completion features. I tried out Oh-my-zsh for a while and I liked the stock Robby Russel prompt. It gave me all the information I cared about: the status of the last command, current directory, and the state of the current Git repository.
However, I didn’t like how slow Oh-my-zsh was making my shell startup. This mattered especially, I think, because my Emacs config would fire up a shell on startup to read the ENV so it could configure some language servers properly. Irked at how long stuff was taking, I set out to build my own.
Today I learned about using zero-knowledge proofs in the context of passwords. These are my rough-and-ready notes from reading. Apparently OpenSSL has an implementation of the SRP algorithm.
...I take a blend of digital and hand-written notes. It’s a bit of a hodgepodge, but it’s working. I used to lean heavily into full-digital notes, but I started drifting towards a mixture of digital and hand-written notes. Initially it was complicated, but I think I’m converging on a good setup. What I describe here will continue to evolve I am sure, but I am enjoying where it’s currently at.
...Programming languages are too slow! I’m not talking about execution speed—I’m talking about evolution speed. Programmers are always building new libraries and embedded DSLs, but the host programming language—particularly its type system—doesn’t understand the domain-specific aspects of these things.
...I’m starting my third year as a PhD student. I thought it would be good to look back on some of the things that have helped me to this point. I study programming languages, but I imagine these things will help anyone in computer science—and some might have application to other STEM fields as well.
There are many softer skills that you need as a PhD student: curiosity, good work ethic, organization, etc. These are essential and nothing can replace them. (Note: that was not an exhaustive list.) I’m going to focus on some of the tools and hard skills that made the ride a little more comfortable. These compliment, rather than compete with, the softer skills that one develops as a beginning researcher.
...I’ve made some big changes to my blog! This post is just for me to document what I’ve done and why, as well as to test some of the new features I’ve added.
First off: new fonts! I am using Valkyrie for the body text and Concourse for the headings. I’ve increased the font size on larger displays for added legibility. I also made the background a little darker for better contrast.
...The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
I probably hate writing code in your favorite programming language, whatever it may be. This is because I get frustrated by basically all of the top 10 languages you’ll find listed anywhere for various reasons. Do I hate programming in Python? You bet I do. “But it’s Python! Python is the best programming language on earth!” I can hear you say. I grant that it has its place. Python wins because its ecosystem of libraries is so huge and because there are so many resources for new users. It’s also garbage collected, which means memory safety is not an issue. It the current hot thing, because there is so much support for machine learning in Python.
...I got a paper published at ECOOP this year! This is my first big paper published at a big conference. As such, I wanted to write down some things that I learned so that in the future I can remember a bit better what was hard for me. That way, should I one day advise PhD students working on their first papers, I can help them through the learning curve better.
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