1 Jun 2023
Here’s a nifty Emacs workflow for doing a project-wide search-and-replace on steroids. While I do use refactor tools that come with language servers,1 sometimes those aren’t enough. Consider the case where you not only need to change the name of a function, but also e.g. need to swap the order of two of its arguments. Or you’ve broken one function out into two that need to be chained together. Whatever—there are plenty of ways where the IDE won’t be able to do everything that you need.
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16 Mar 2023
Some years ago I came across a blog post that described programmers as being in one of three camps. It's a fun, short post, so I encourage you to go read that real quick, but the gist of it is that programmers generally fall into one of three categories according to what they primarily value:
Applied mathematicians, who appreciate elegant solutions to problems. Program execution on von Neumann machines is incidental.
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17 Nov 2022
I had a friend ask me what continuations are, and why they're useful. There's a ton of literature about continuations; this is just a simple example meant to showcase something small and hopefully grokkable.
You will need to understand a little bit of Racket, but if you know any Scheme, that should be good enough. If you just want a quick primer, check out Learn X in Y minutes for Racket.
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7 Nov 2022
Wikipedia1 cites a few different sources on what "Unix Philosophy" is. Peter Salus summarizes it as:
Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. That second bullet point is my favorite: making composable programs rather than monolithic systems. In this way, Unix is designed to be a forge for easily building new tools.
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1 Aug 2022
This week I created a custom build of the Iosevka font. I've used Input Mono for a long time now, and was very happy with it. However, it was missing a few glyphs that I wanted to use. Moreover, I didn't have a license for the Input font to use on e.g. my blog. Iosevka is stupendously customizable, so I thought I'd see if I could get something close to Input's styles.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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27 Feb 2019
I gave a presentation at the Utah Elixir Meetup this February. Here’s the recording of my presentation:
Watch on YouTube I’ve posted the slides as an HTML file, along with some materials to follow along with, on my GitHub account. Check it out!
24 Jan 2019
Marked Man (mm) is a little program I wrote to view Markdown files like UNIX man pages. (Because who wants to leave their terminal just to open a file?)
It uses Pandoc to convert between Markdown and the groff format. As a happy side-effect, this program can read basically anything as a man page: HTML, LaTeX, Word files (seriously), ePub, etc. Anything that Pandoc can read, Marked Man can handle.
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