Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
Category: Data Structures
It's been a while since I've written about any data structures. But it just so happens that I'm actually really working on implementing a really interesting and broadly useful data structure now, called a Rope. A bit of background,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:14 PM • 11 Comments •
Category: Abstract Algebra
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...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:57 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Haskell
So, after our last installment, describing the theory of monads, and the previous posts, which focused on representing things like state and I/O, I thought it was worth taking a moment to look at a different kind of thing...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:52 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Basics
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,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 6:38 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Haskell
As promised, I'm finally going to get to the theory behind monads. As a quick review, the basic idea of the monad in Haskell is a hidden transition function - a monad is, basically, a state transition function. The...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:02 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Haskell
Time for more monads. In this article, I'm going to show you how to implement a very simple state monad - it's a trivial monad which allows you to use a mutable state consisting of a single integer. Then...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:00 AM • 9 Comments •
Category: Haskell
The biggest nightmare for most people learning Haskell is monads. Monads are the key to how you can implement IO, state, parallelism, and sequencing (among numerous other things) in Haskell. The trick is wrapping your head around them....
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:03 PM • 11 Comments •
Category: Haskell
One thing that we've seen already in Haskell programs is type classes. Today, we're going to try to take our first look real look at them in detail - both how to use them, and how to define them....
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:36 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Haskell
So, we've built up some pretty nifty binary trees - we can use the binary tree both as the basis of an implementation of a set, or as an implementation of a dictionary. But our implementation has had one...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:36 PM • 12 Comments •
Category: Haskell
In Haskell, there are no looping constructs. Instead, there are two alternatives: there are list iteration constructs (like foldl which we've seen before), and tail recursion. Let me say, up front, that in Haskell if you find yourself writing...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:02 PM • 21 Comments •
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
