DaFoster

I’m working on a new project to build a typechecking linter for Python, in the same vein as mypy.

Courtesy of xkcd If you spend a lot of time on the computer like I do, there’s a good chance that there are some websites that you spend too much time on.

In recent years the larger software development community has started to pay more attention to version numbers.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with the language Idris, one of the rare dependently-typed programming languages.1 For example you can write a sorting function that is proven correct by the compiler at compile time: sort : (inputList:Vect n e) ->…

Programming languages (and the ecosystems that surround them) are incredibly interesting.

There are many ways that programs can handle errors at runtime.

So I haven’t written any posts for a long time.

Recently I needed to submit a Python app to the Mac App Store.

I’ve been intensively studying Japanese recently1, and something I have to do quite a lot is look up Japanese words that I see in images.

These are my second impressions of the Agda programming language after writing (or trying to write) a few simple Agda programs.

Color is a perceived property of light that enters the eye.

These are my first impressions of the Agda programming language after researching it in some depth but before writing any actual Agda programs.

If you have notes in the “On My Phone” or “On My Mac” accounts but want to move them to an email account instead, this article provides instructions for moving the notes.

I finally found an online tutorial for Haskell that involves writing a non-trivial program: Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours It’s an excellent tutorial and has given me a good impression of Haskell for building a medium-sized non-trivial program: a LISP

Today I invested a few hours into learning Scrivener, a tool created for the purpose of writing long-form texts such as books, screenplays, etc.

I work in the data analysis industry and am appalled that the kinds of tools I am building are being abused by the government to spy on ordinary citizens without public oversight.

This Washington state initiative requires foods that are themselves GMO to be labeled as such.

This year I attended Strange Loop, a conference on emerging tools, languages, and trends in software.

Regular expressions are a concise way to search and transform strings using patterns.

I don’t learn new programming languages very often.

I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday going through the work of Bret Victor, who appears to be on a personal mission to bring interactive computing to mainstream developers.

This weekend I spent some time writing programs that scrape the contents of various websites to extract information.

Technical & Tools JavaScript ecosystem.

Social How to manage managers.

This weekend I open-sourced a script called notifymail which I have been using for the past few years to send myself emails from automated scripts, particularly Python scripts.

Most of the time programs operate happily inside their main scenario.

A remarkable number of programs do not handle text in a reasonable fashion, which causes those programs to break when confronted with non-English characters and symbols.

There are several new features in RDiscount 2.1.6.

Audience I assume familiarity with the Haskell programming language or some other language that supports calling a function with less arguments than the function's signature requires.

I’ve read a lot of programming books.

Mac users get rather annoyed when using programs that feel like they’re just a port from another OS (usually Windows).

This is a quick overview of copyrights and licenses for software developers who may not know their rights under United States law.

Today I decided to explore the realm of Tor Hidden Services, which can be identified via URLs that appear to be on an .onion top-level domain.

Last week I decided to update one of my larger Python 2.7 projects to support Unicode fully and to run under Python 3.

It has been said that you can learn a lot from reading other people’s high-quality software.

I’ve been using BBEdit as my primary text editor on the Mac for over 10 years.

p4status works like git status (or svn status), but works in Perforce.

A killer app is any product that is so desirable that it fuels the sale/adoption of a larger technology that the product depends on.

Generally Racket appears to be a very usable dialect of Lisp/Scheme.

What is Prolog?

Here’s an interactive chart showing high-level properties of various programming languages.

It has been just over two years since RDiscount 1.6.8 (the previous version) was posted.

Recently I took the liberty of reading one of the defining books in the domain of computer science: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, often abbreviated as SICP.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis I like learning new languages to get myself to think about problems in different ways.

A representative from IBM came to visit me in college several years ago when I was a student and talked about several things he wished he knew before working in the software industry.1 I’ve found his advice to be very useful at various points during my ca…

I love programming.

And this is my first post using the new system.

TLDR: Drupal is overly complex for a personal blog.

The old Retrospect 6.0 In the past I have used Retrospect 6.0 to backup my Macs, since it was one of the few programs that reliably backed up everything correctly, with all the metadata intact.

It occurs to me that anime has been an important driver for improving my programming abilities.