Fabulous adventures in coding

I wanted to implement concise pattern matching" in Python, a language which unlike C#, F#, Scala, and so on, does not have any pattern matching built in. Logically a pattern is just a predicate: a function which takes a value ... Continue reading

Before getting into the details of how my combinator-inspired source code transformation system works, I should say first, what is a general overview of the system? and second, why did I build it at all? In my experience, a typical ... Continue reading

How do we write a compiler in a typical general-purpose line-of-business OO programming language such as Python, C#, Java, and so on? Compilers are programs, so we could make the question more general: how do we write programs? The basic ... Continue reading

The European starling is a lovely looking bird, though territorial, noisy and aggressive up close. Unfortunately, they are very invasive in North America. Most of the hundreds of millions of European starlings now living in the Americas can be found ... Continue reading

In the autumn of last year my friend Joan and I went on a little trip up to the Skagit valley north of Seattle to photograph birds of prey; I managed to get a blurry but recognizable shot of this ... Continue reading

Reader Joel" had an insightful comment on the first part of this series which I thought deserved a short episode of its own. Recall that we proved the theorem if a compositional forest contains a mockingbird then every bird in ... Continue reading

For the next part in my Bean Machine retrospective to make sense I'll need to make a short digression. In looking back on the almost 20 years I've been blogging, it is surprising to me that I've only briefly alluded ... Continue reading

Happy New Year all! Last time I briefly described the basic strategy of the Beanstalk compiler: transform the source codeof each queried or observed function (and transitively their callees) into an equivalent program whichpartially evaluatesthe model,accumulating a graphas it goes. ... Continue reading

Let’s take another look at the “hello world” example and think more carefully about what is actually going on: There’s a lot going on here. Let’s start by clearing up what the returned values of the random variables are. It … Continue reading →

I’ll get back to Bean Machine and Beanstalk in the next episode; today, a brief diversion to discuss a general principle of language design and congratulate some of my former colleagues. Back when we were all at Waterloo, a bunch … Continue reading →

Did I actually build a compiler? Yes and no. Traditionally we think of a compiler as a program which takes as its input the text of a program written in one language (C#, say), and produces as its output an … Continue reading →

Introducing Beanstalk Last time I introduced Bean Machine Graph, a second implementation of the PPL team’s Bayesian inference algorithm. We can compare and contrast the two implementations: In short, the BMG user experience is comparatively not a great experience for … Continue reading →

Introducing Bean Machine Graph Bean Machine has many nice properties: I’m not going to go into details of how Bean Machine proper implements inference, at least not at this time. Suffice to say that the implementation of the inference algorithms … Continue reading →

As I mentioned in the previous episode, the entire Bean Machine team was dissolved; some team members were simply fired, others were absorbed into other teams, and some left the company. In this series I’m going to talk a bit … Continue reading →

It’s been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises. Apologies that this is so long; I didn’t have … Continue reading →

Here we go again! Fellow BASIC enthusiast Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood, of Stack Overflow and Discourse fame, has started a project to translate the programs in the 1978 classic BASIC Computer Games into more modern languages. I never had a … Continue reading →

What regular work activity has the highest impact on the organization in the least amount of time and effort? I haven’t done any science on this, but anecdotally it sure feels like recruiting, interviewing and mentoring are all huge impact-per-time … Continue reading →

Since I’m staying home all day due to the ongoing pandemic emergency, I’ve decided to document all the different species of birds that arrive in my yard. I am not a great bird photographer but I am enjoying practicing every … Continue reading →

This was supposed to be the last episode of this series, but while writing it I discovered a bug in my implementation of Hensel’s QuickLife algorithm. It’s a small defect, easily fixed, but I thought it might be interesting to … Continue reading →