I'm a great fan of the Yeti programming language, a JVM-based functional language which I think offers an irresistible combination of easy, fluent syntax with rigorous typechecking and good interoperability and performance. Yeti is written by one developer, Madis Janson. I dropped him a note with a few questions about the origin of and his… Continue reading Conversing with the author of the Yeti programming language
Category: Work
Looking at the Sonic Visualiser user survey (part 1)
Ever since Sonic Visualiser hit version 1.7 in mid-2009, it has included a survey feature to find out what its users think of it. It waits until you've used it a few times. Then it pops up a dialog, just once, asking if you'd like to fill in the survey. If you say yes, you… Continue reading Looking at the Sonic Visualiser user survey (part 1)
Yertle: an RDF/Turtle library in Yeti
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
“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
The Breakfast Post 