Machine Lines

One of the first language pretty-printers was the 1965 “ALGOL 60 Reference Language Editor”, designed to clean up badly-transcribed programs by tweaking indentation.

Via Hacker News, my one social-media vice, I get exposed to a lot of technical blog posts, websites advertising software, and general Silicon Valley-speak.

I’m going to show you some examples of how Raven handles async, which might seem surprising.

If you used JavaScript before Promise was introduced (over ten years ago now!)

Computers were born to simulate the world.

A few weeks ago I talked about a new direction for Raven, where we prioritise slotting into existing JavaScript projects over a more standalone setup.

Happy new year everyone!

Here’s an early Christmas present for you: the Raven repo is now public!

I’m taking a crack at solving Advent of Code using Raven, a little programming language I’m working on which compiles to WebAssembly.

Welcome!

It’s been a busy month!

The new compiler is live!

I previously mentioned that I’m porting Raven from Julia to TypeScript.

I found a good new use for Claude Code: a semi-systematic review of papers that cite Flux and Zygote.

All programs work with information.

George Orwell wrote 1984 from a particularly remote part of a remote Scottish island.

A friend of mine was recently given an interview task: a spec for a simple command-line tool, along with ten or so increasingly fiddly feature requests, in case of any free time before the two-hour deadline.

I (quietly) announced Raven this month.

I’ve been working on a new programming language, called Raven.

I’m bringing you less of a deep dive this issue, because this month has involved a relatively menial refactor of the type system implementation.

Programming languages usually give you many kinds of objects to work with, like numbers, strings and dictionaries.

Raven supports method overloading, so you can define a function multiple times for different kinds of inputs. fn describe(x: Integer) { "a whole number" } fn describe(x: Float64) { "a decimal number" } test describe(1) == "a whole number" test describe(1…

One reason languages like Python and R are slow is that they have to continually check what they’re supposed to be doing, as they’re doing it.

Up to now, Raven has only supported running via Node.js.

Inside every phone, laptop and tablet is a stamp-sized metal square called the CPU (for “central processing unit”).

The Zig language begins with a barebones C-like system.

A fun update this month: as of Saturday my website has a sponsor dashboard where you can see all previous issues of these emails, after logging in with GitHub.

All programs work with information.

It lives!

Raven is meant to feel fresh yet familiar.

This month’s issue is a little late (sorry!)

I’ve been reading Nadia Eghbal’s “Working in Public”.

Happy New Fiscal Year everyone, at least in the UK.

WebAssembly is an odd compiler target, because of its unusual mix of high- and low-level style.

Hello all.

Last month a startup called Modular released a new language called Mojo (not to be confused with the existing indigenous one).

Most programming languages conflate the building of data structures and the modelling of information.

Conversations with ChatGPT, a recently released chatbot, reportedly cost its inventors at OpenAI a few cents each.

Three years and two months after it launched on Kickstarter, copies of social deduction game Blood on the Clocktower are finally arriving in the UK.

I just put up a draft paper with a proposal for mixing imperative and functional styles of programming.

The website thispersondoesnotexist.com shows off images created by StyleGAN, a kind of machine learning model trained on around 70,000 headshots from Flickr.

It’s easy to mock NFTs (non-fungible tokens),[1] or even to feel cynical about them.

So you want to show off the size of your dictionary?

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything.”

Roland Barthes’ essay on “The Death of the Author” is inscrutable to this reader.

Mistakes slip into publications of all kinds.

An astronomer might say that blue is the warmest colour, and red the coolest.

The goal of statistical inference is to tell us things that we didn’t know based on things we do.

Here’s a plot of Covid-19’s reproductive rate ( RRR) over time in the UK, based on daily case numbers and seroprevalence surveys.

Throughout history, people have used coded language – hiding secrets in plain sight – for self protection.