Lex Spoon

I've been hacking in M4 recently, and I ran across a great article about M4 by Michael Breen. I highly recommend it for anyone either u...

When geeking out about language design, it's tempting to focus on the things that require learning something new to even understand how ...

Discussion on the Scala collections revamp is starting to get mystical. It really bugs me: good language design makes a huge difference, bu...

Apple has put out Swift , which sounds like a nice language overall. Here is my flagrantly non-humble opinion about how its features line up...

Type inference can make code much better. It can save you from writing down something that is completely obvious, and thus a total waste of ...

It's getting out of hand the way C compilers exploit undefined behavior. I see via John Regehr's blog that there is a SPEC benchmark...

Gilad Bracha has a great post up on virtual classes : I wanted to share a nice example of class hierarchy inheritance....All we need then, ...

I recently explored using JavaScript source maps with a language very different from JavaScript. Source maps let developers debug in a web...

I would like to draw a connection between two lines of research: deprecation, and product lines. The punchline is that my personal view on d...

Evan Farrer has an interesting post up where he converts some code from Python to Haskell. Kudos to Farrer for empirically studying a langu...

Via Lambda the Ultimate , I see that Jonathan Shapiro has a rambling retrospective on BitC and why he thinks it has gotten into a dead end....

I enjoyed watching Gilad Bracha present Dart to a group of Stanford professors and students. As one might expect, given Bracha's backgr...

Cloud9 has a well-written call for adding classes to JavaScript : Adding classes to JavaScript is technically not hard -- yet, its impact c...

Google has posted a technical overview and a language specification for Dart, their new programming language for web browsers. In short, ...

Lance Fortnow laments that no matter how crotchety he gets he can't seem to give up LaTeX : LaTeX is a great system for mathematical do...

I've been meaning to get around to posting on type erasure, and Cedric Beust beat me to it : The main problem is that reified generics ...

There are two separate lines of work on type inference. While they are superficially similar, they face very different design constraints. L...

Martin Odersky talked today at ScalaDays about the state of Scala. Here are the highlights for me. Tools and Documentation He doesn't...

I just ran across Sven Efftinge's fun post on what he wants to see in a Java-killer language. My list would be something like: remove...

One branch of functional-programming enthusiasts have long strived to eliminate state from programming. By doing so, you end up with program...