http://www.weaselhat.com Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:20:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The indomitable Nate Foster has released Boomerang v0.1. Congratulations, Nate! Boomerang is a bidirectional programming language over strings: it maps input strings to output strings, and then it maps outputs back to inputs. This is perfect for translation, synchronization, and other tasks: think of them as update-able views in ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2008/07/25/boomerang/ Via Dave Herman and Lambda the Ultimate: ADTs in JavaScript 1.8. Shouldn't be too hard to Flapjax-ify, which might make the handling of lists a little nicer. I have to say, I can breathe a sigh of relief now that the expression problem has been solved in JavaScript. All ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2008/06/18/adts-in-js18/ I've updated boolopt to fix an output bug pointed out by Chris Gorecki. The net effect was to remove the used list used when finding prime implicants, which was preventing meaningful output for some trivial formulae. http://www.weaselhat.com/2008/02/21/boolopt-update-v11/ This is a week overdue, but here is the solution to the puzzle of January 17th: Download the solution to "Correspondence, of a sort" How far did everyone get? Tips? I realize this was way, way too hard. I'll make another one in a week or two (ha!), when ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2008/02/01/solution-correspondence-of-a-sort/ If you've seen me in the past year or so, you've probably seen me with a crossword puzzle. I've thought about making one for a long time. This week, I dorked out beyond all belief and did it. It's got a computer science theme, which is why ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2008/01/18/crossword/ Frankly, how do you do it? In particular, how do you do it well? So much writing in CS is obscure and difficult, if not poorly edited, I'm not sure where to look. What are some examples of good writing in computer science research? Functional pearls tend to ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2007/12/05/writing-in-computer-science/ After reading Brendan Eich's annotated slides from @media Ajax. I was formerly of two minds: on the one hand, I'd started to feel like JavaScript was hopeless, BASIC with closures and a dynamic object system that precludes efficient compilation; on the other, I'd started to feel the JS FP ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2007/11/30/js2/ Reading this experience report from the DARPA challenge via Slashdot, I wondered: if event registration caused object retention, how can we deal with these memory issues in Flapjax? Worrying about memory leaks in JavaScript is a losing battle -- the browsers have different collectors. But given functional reactive programming in ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2007/11/17/c-gc-leaks/ In the Flapjax programming language, ‘lifting’ is the automatic conversion of operations on ordinary values into operations on time-varying values. Lifting gets its name from an explicit operation used with Flapjax-as-a-library; we use the transform method call or the lift_{b,e} functions. To better understand lifting, we’ll walk through a simple ... http://www.weaselhat.com/2007/08/11/lifting-in-flapjax/ Last week I accepted the University of Pennsylvania's offer to study for a PhD (in PL). A few cool people there: Benjamin Pierce Rajeev Alur Stephanie Weirich Steve Zdancewic Val Tannen Ben Taskar Fernando Pereira I'm really excited! http://www.weaselhat.com/2007/04/16/upenn/