programming:
Since I mentioned the idea of monoids as a formal models of computations, John Armstrong made the natural leap ahead, to the connection between monoids and monads - which are a common feature in programming language semantics, and a...
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Posted on March 11, 2008 10:57 AM • 5 Comments •
Today is the 70th birthday of Donald Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is, then you're not a programmer. If you're a programmer and you don't know who Knuth is, well... I have no idea what rock you've...
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Posted on January 10, 2008 11:38 AM • 65 Comments •
One of the problems with many of the interesting graph algorithms is that they're complex. As graphs get large, computations over them can become extremely slow. For example, graph coloring is NP-complete - so the time to run a...
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Posted on October 24, 2007 9:59 AM • 14 Comments •
Since my post on datatypes for my π-calculus language, I've gotten a bunch of questions from people who (I guess) picked up on the series after the original post where I said that the idea of the series was...
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Posted on April 29, 2007 9:47 PM • 33 Comments •
For the basics, I wrote a bunch of stuff about sorting. It seems worth taking a moment to talk about something related: binary search. Binary search is one of the most important and fundamental algorithms, and it shows up...
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Posted on April 7, 2007 12:08 PM • 14 Comments •
I feel like a bit of a change of pace, and trying a bit of an experiment. Re-reading Backus's old FP work reminds me of what I was doing the last time I read it, which was back in...
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Posted on March 21, 2007 8:53 PM • 26 Comments •
In my earlier post about John Backus, I promised to write something about his later work on functional programming languages. While I was in a doctors office getting treated for an awful cough, I re-read his 1977 Turing Award...
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Posted on March 20, 2007 5:00 PM • 22 Comments •
Many people would probably say that things like computability and the halting program aren't basics. But I disagree: many of our basic intuitions about numbers and the things that we can do with them are actually deeply connected with...
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Posted on February 6, 2007 10:05 PM • 36 Comments •
As long as I'm doing all of these basics posts, I thought it would be worth explaining just what a Turing machine is. I frequently talk about things being Turing equivalent, and about effective computing systems, and similar things,...
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Posted on February 3, 2007 6:38 PM • 18 Comments •
In the comments thread of the post on Turing Equivalent vs Turing Complete, there've been a flurry of questions and comments about some stuff involving computational complexity. So I thought it would be interesting to write a couple of...
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Posted on January 7, 2007 9:05 PM • 16 Comments •
As you may have noticed, lately, I've been fascinated by Haskell. I haven't done anything much in it until quite recently; it's been sitting in my to-do queue for a long time. This weekend, I was hacking away on a...
Posted on November 25, 2006 7:18 PM • 32 Comments •
One of my fellow ScienceBloggers, Karmen at Chaotic Utopia pointed out a spectacularly stupid statement in Casey Luskin's critique of Carl Zimmer (another fellow SBer) at the Discovery Institutes "Center for Science and Culture". Now normally, I might not pile...
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Posted on November 21, 2006 1:45 PM • 35 Comments •
I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on one of my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org, and it's called Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to...
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Posted on November 2, 2006 9:31 AM • 136 Comments •
While I was waiting for stuff to install on my new machine, I was doing some browsing around the web, and came across an interesting article at a blog called "The Only Winning Move", titled Scheme Death Knell?. It's not...
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Posted on October 24, 2006 4:39 PM • 41 Comments •
Back at my old digs last week, I put up a post about programming languages and types. It produced an interesting discussion, which ended up shifting topics a bit, and leading to a very interesting question from one of the...
Posted on June 7, 2006 5:47 PM • 26 Comments •
