4 Jul 2022
μKanren (“micro-Kanren”) is a tiny, embeddable logic programming language. It’s easy to understand and implement in almost any language. It’s a great case study of an embedded language: unlike other common “embedded” languages like SQL or regex, which normally are represented as just plain-old strings, μKanren takes more advantage of the host language’s features.
I recommend reading the original paper: it’s short, well-written, and easy to understand.
I did a write-up which you can read on Codeberg. The README is my set of notes that I made while walking through the implementation of the paper, and the repository contains an implementation in Racket. I’ve included some fun use cases like a type checker/inference engine that takes up only 37 lines of code!
...
2 Jul 2022
Brief update on the blog: I had been running a custom fork of the Anatole theme; it diverged pretty heavily, and I found a nice way to customize the CSS. Behold! The new-and-improved blog.
Some of the new extensions to Anatole include the ability to set a static page as your profile; I’ll do this and include links to lists of publications and whatnot. This should make my blog a better place for my professional/academic life.
...
2 Mar 2022
I have a hard time keeping these terms straight:
- liveness vs. safety
- soundness vs. completeness
This is intended as a short guide for myself; maybe someone else will find it useful too! Note that this is all to the best of my knowledge and understanding at the present time; if there be faults, they be the faults of myself. I welcome correction and clarification if I am wrong.
Liveness vs. Safety
#
Liveness and safety deal with properties of a system. Contrast that with soundness and completion, which are adjectives about analyses.
...
18 Dec 2021
A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!
...
7 Dec 2021
The following is from a essay from a class on German literature and film.
Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis is primarily about the struggle between the oppressed working class and the ruling elite. What drives this tension, however, is a particular view of technology and technological progress that exacerbates the problems the film focuses on. This mentality is called high modernist ideology by Scott in his book Seeing Like a State:
...
9 Nov 2021
What does this program do? At the most reduced level, one could say that a program’s behavior is defined by the effect it has on the hardware running it. That’s not very useful however; when we’re programming, we often have to deal with legacy code and tease out the original intent of the code.
Saying that the meaning of a program is entirely encapsulated by the code is saying that the intent and the implementation are the same. They so rarely are!
...
24 Oct 2021
Last week I was studying outside of a lecture hall where someone was teaching an introductory course on computer programming. There was a lot that I overheard that I disagreed with; this essay is an attempt to help me crystallize what exactly I disagreed with.
...
21 Aug 2021
My wife and I got a chance to go to a place that lets you paint pottery and then have it fired. The pottery is all pre-made; you just get to paint it.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve worked with a physical art medium, so the mug looks kinda dumpy. I did alright with the Racket logo on the bottom-inside of the mug though!
...
3 Aug 2021
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
— Erasmus of Rotterdam
Used bookstores are my arch nemesis.
...
27 Jul 2021
Control-Flow Analysis is a popular technique for performing static analysis of many different kinds of programming languages.
It’s most often needed in cases where you have some kind of dynamic dispatch: either where you have first-class functions or when you have objects and you call one of their methods.
...