I wrote a little while back about the Yeti programming language and the most pleasant time I was having with it, learning and re-learning some functional programming idioms. One of the first things I set about writing—because I could think of a use for it and it seemed like a nice thing to make—was a… Continue reading Yertle: an RDF/Turtle library in Yeti
Category: Code
“What’s the difference between Mercurial and git?”
A short post I wrote over at the SoundSoftware site. Spoiler: The answer I gave was not "Mercurial can be understood by human beings". Let me know if you spot any mistakes (or just want to flame, of course). A colleague pointed out that a big problem I didn't help with at all is how… Continue reading “What’s the difference between Mercurial and git?”
Compiling a program is a strange thing to do
Following my previous post about functional languages, a suspicious reader asked about the list of prerequisites I gave for a language: purely functional, Hindley-Milner typing, compiling to JVM bytecode, blah blah blah. Was that list genuine—or was I by any chance just listing the properties of a language I'd stumbled over at random and decided… Continue reading Compiling a program is a strange thing to do
Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
Twenty years ago, as a maths-and-computing undergraduate at the university of Bath, I was introduced to functional programming using the ML language by the excellent Julian Padget. We undergrads were set the traditional assignment of writing a sed-like text processor in ML, and found it first baffling and then, if we were lucky, rather exciting.… Continue reading Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
Can you develop research software on an iPad?
I've just written up a blog article for the Software Sustainability Institute about research software development in a "post-PC" world. (Also available on my project's own site.) Apart from using the terms "post-PC", "touch tablet", "app store", and "cloud" a disgracefully large number of times, this article sets out a problem that's been puzzling me… Continue reading Can you develop research software on an iPad?
How Much Legacy Code Have You Written This Week?
I recently bought a copy (based on a recommendation) of Michael Feathers’ 2005 book Working Effectively with Legacy Code. This excellent technical book is largely a compendium of refactoring strategies to help software developers insinuate unit tests into existing code. What I found most striking, though, is a position stated right at the start of… Continue reading How Much Legacy Code Have You Written This Week?
The Breakfast Post 