Allanderek's blog

A very detailed and thorough post regarding named and optional arguments, in particular a proposal to include them in Rust.

Viral instruction wrote a blog post way back in 2021 explaining the difference between union and sum types.

Vaibhav Sagar gave a talk at ZuriHac Why Do Companies Stop Using Haskell?.

Dan Luu, who is now fast becoming for me an unmissable blogger, has written-up another excellent study in using coding agents.

Pranoy Dutta has written a post describing three good features of programming languages.

Austin Henley has written a post titled: Type inference has usability problems.

Zach Kehs has written an interesting post titled: There’s no limit to how bad code can get.

Nimin has a post regarding the use of the M4 macro processor.

Jim Nielsen has written regarding uptime percentages.

The new gren-format tool does not remove unnecessary parentheses.

Gilbert Ramirez has written a good post-mortem on the challenges of writing Gren format.

Ladybird adopts Rust In the original post I discussed the fact that Ladybird, a full web browser written in C++ had overtaken Servo, a web rendering engine written in Rust, in web platform tests passing.

I have written about lambdas several times: First regarding lambda syntax in Python Then again about lambda syntax in Elm Then again critiquing a post about Python lambdas The common theme in all of these is roughly: Does lambda syntax really need to exis…

Mojo is now open source, via Simon Willison.

Video Link: Jayaprabhakar Kadarkarai - Create your own DSLs This is technically a link to a talk contained within a video.

A great small post python’s pre-declared constants are kinda weird examining Python’s constants.

The Google developers blog has published a post Why Go is an Ideal Language for AI-Assisted Software Engineering.

In a somewhat non-specific titled blog post: What’s the best programming language for coding agents?

Video Link: Reliability lessons from SQLite at Software Should Work Richard Hipp the creator of SQLite, clearly one of the best pieces of software in the world, gives a talk on reliability lessons from SQLite.

Link: Twenty years of Pandoc An interesting look back at the first twenty years of Pandoc by its creator and maintainer John MacFarlane.

The following post 23 languages, one I can check showed up on my feed.

Video Link: Dependency Cultures: Software Should Work An interesting talk by Richard Feldman well-known to most Elm developers and now working on his own Roc programming language.

Link: Functional Programming from First Principles: Part 1 motivation An interesting start to what looks like a series of articles on functional programming.

Last summer I got interested in fantasy football again.

I haven’t ever spoken about the scoring system we use on pole prediction to grade Formula One predictions.

I was asked to watch an episode of Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO featuring Mo Gawdat introduced as an Ex-Google officer available here.

Link: A testing conundrum A thoughtful blog post by Ned Batchelder regarding a difficulty in testing a class that on the face of it should be straightforward to test.

I’m working on a project for which I’m using Go, as well as LLMs, mostly Sonnet 4.5 via Claude Code.

Self-recommending absolutely bangning post from Simon Willison regarding combining HTML, Javascript, and CSS into a single file, which can then be served on static hosting.

Link: I Tried Gleam for Advent of Code, and I Get the Hype Nice, short and thoughtful blog post regarding trying out Gleam for the advent of code this year, and liking it.

A good blog post on avoiding space leaks in Haskell showed up on my feed today.

A few weeks ago I wrote about an issue in the book ‘Empire of A.I.’ by Karen Hao.

Cindy Sridharan writes an interesting post which questions the wisdom of keeping functions small.

I regularly (more than once a week) receive obvious spam direct into my Gmail inbox.

Lovely blog post from Herman who operates the bear blog blogging service.

I sometimes find that developers do not really have a good grasp on the point of laziness in a programming language, believing that it is mostly an optimisation.

Previously I reported on long Elm compilation times and that being related to large .elmi files.

This post details a problem with the Elm compiler that results in long compilation times or large memory usage (and possibly OOM issues) and a possible way to fix it, as in change your application so that your compilation times are shorter.

Update: 2025-11-24 Andy Masley has a much more in-depth look at this is issue, including a response from the author, and his response to that response is well worth reading.

Using Claude code I noticed something a little strange, which I at first thought might give some insight into how LLMs are manipulating code, but turns out is probably nothing to do with that an merely how it displays those changes to the user.

Syntax highlighting is having something of a moment.

An interesting post on the Unplanned Obsolescence blog.I’ve asked before what dynamically typed languages are good for and one answer I’ve come up with is meta-programming.

The Entropic Thoughts blog has a new post: “Non-Obvious Haskell Idiom: ViewPattern Argument Transform” regarding something I didn’t know existed in Haskell, and it touches upon something I’ve written about before so I’d like to say how they are related, a…

Martin Janickek has a great post “Elm Queues Shootout” which is well worth reading.

Dillon Kearns of elm-pages and elm-radio fame has a really good analogy for feature requests, whether they be feature requests for an end-user application or API changes to a software library, or even say changes to a programming language.

Cracking post on the Elm discourse by john_s in response to rupert’s question regarding “intensely monadic code”.

I’m interested in programming languages and often look at the websites for new/isoteric programming languages.

The success of Ladybird (C++) overtaking Servo (Rust) challenges some assumptions I have about the programming language productivity, particularly with respect to strong, static typing, and the lack of a satisfying explanation allows me to update my priors

A couple of weeks back after the GPT-5 release, I wrote a skeptical post that the fact that the GPT-5 model picker release was botched was something of a bearish sign for llm-assisted programming: Okay, but if OpenAI cannot utilise their own models in cod…

I use SQL in many projects, and that is often in the form of SQLite.