Lambda Land

Bedrock is a minimal, human-crafted starter-kit for Emacs, and today I’m pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Bedrock is available!

Some years ago I worked with a software developer from Germany.

Regardless of how you feel about generative AI—love it or hate it—the worst thing you can do with it is use it to write for you.

If you add animations to slideshows, they should serve some semantic or rhetorical purpose.

I got asked a good question today: what is the difference between Tree-sitter and a language server?

I guess I’m a runner now.

I started using Typst about a month ago to write my dissertation proposal.

The past few weeks have seen major AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare outages.

I got asked how I manage papers, notes, and citations for doing research.

There are few sounds as satisfying to me as a lock popping open, especially when it’s a well-machined lock that makes a nice, crisp “chink!”

There’s something icky about LLM-generated text when you think it’s written by a human.

I just released version 1.5.0 of Emacs Bedrock—a super minimal starter kit for Emacs.

The key principle I follow is this: how I take my notes will evolve over time.

Many developers seem to have a fanatic obsession with monospace fonts and using them to make their blogs look “cool”.

There’s been an explosion of tools for software development.

When I was in my early 20s, I vowed that I would keep my kids from watching any amount of television.

LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system hamstrung by a few decades-old decisions and some… ahem… questionable design decisions.

Emacs has come a long way in the past decade.

Should a programming language be powerful and let a programmer do a lot, or should it be safe and protect the programmer from bad mistakes?

In my last post I described how I made a very fast BF interpreter.

I recently wrote about using first-class functions to help make a BF interpreter.

I got to visit the Stasi museum in Berlin this week, and it gave me a newfound appreciation for why it’s important to resist surveillance.

We’re going to be writing a BF compiler for a class I’m in.

I started using the Zsh a few years ago and I’ve liked its completion features.

Today I learned about using zero-knowledge proofs in the context of passwords.

I take a blend of digital and hand-written notes.

Programming languages are too slow!

I’m starting my third year as a PhD student.

The Tao gave birth to machine language.

I got a paper published at ECOOP this year!

Chorex is a brand-new Elixir library for choreographic programming [3]: Chorex provides a macro-based DSL that lets you describe how processes communicate to perform a computation.

If you ask anyone what the best Emacs packages are, you’ll almost definitely hear Magit (the only Git porcelain worth using) and Org Mode (a way to organize anything and everything in plain text) listed as #1 and #2.

This is the story of how I solved a problem (ugly, cumbersome boilerplate code) that I ran into while writing a program in a functional language (Elixir).

I am building a little text editor in Haskell.1 Why would I do such a thing?

Somewhere in my adolescence I got stuck with the notion that functional languages were slow while languages like C were fast.

Macros are tricky beasts.

Something I’ve wondered about for a little while: why don’t more languages have a call/cc operator?

These are some of my class notes.

I got a strange email the other day.

I started my PhD program about a year ago.

Here’s a nifty Emacs workflow for doing a project-wide search-and-replace on steroids.

I hiked up Desolation Trail with Scott Wiersdorf.

There are a bunch of different ways of writing a macro in Racket.

I recently made an update to how I build my blog.

I believe computer science plays as integral of a part to a well-rounded liberal arts education as does mathematics and linguistics.

I recently managed to get access to my Outlook email from Emacs.

I’ve talked at some length about continuations and what they can do.

How many JavaScript developers are there?

Some years ago I came across a blog post that described programmers as being in one of three camps.

I once worked as a part of a company with four employees, all of us programmers.