Michael Fogus's Blog, page 8

Inspirational technical books that are not technical

There’s a whole class of books on technology that are histories of some system or software or some-such that are not at all technical. However, in every case below I found myself highly motivated to write code and/or create a software system after (often during) reading these books. I hereby present my favorite inspirational technical […]

Six works of Computer Science-Fiction

Computer Science-Fiction1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the art of programming.2 Smalltalk-80: The language and […]

Palindromic sequences in Clojure

Lately I’ve been obsessed with palindromes. I have no idea why, but I find the topic fascinating. Besides reading papers and books1 on the subject, I’ve been exploring writing some utilities for detecting2 and generating palindromes in Clojure sequences. Before I talk about a couple of (IMO) cool Clojure functions, let me take a moment […]

Code painting

I have a confession to make. I have a lot of ongoing projects. From a trilogy of books on programming, to a re-read of the masterworks of science fiction, to various love letters to Lisp 1, to language meandering, to game design, to baseball, to abstract strategy, I like to flit my mind from topic […]

The best things and stuff of 2014

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2014. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new. also: see the lists from 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 Great blog posts read What happens if you write a TCP stack in Python? Julia Evans answers this question with “something awesome.” I […]

First compiled languages – Twitter survey

Yesterday I asked a question on the Twitters: Q: What was the first compiled programming language that you ever used? #firstcompiled— Fogus (@fogus) December 8, 2014 Amazingly I’ve received (so far) 59 responses that break down roughly into the following groups. I don’t have any interest in analyzing the data deeply,1 but I think it’s […]

Read-Eval-Print-λove v002 – UrLISP is go!

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally put the finishing touches on the latest installment of Read-Eval-Print-λove, the Lisp/Little Languages zine. In the latest installment I discuss the roots of Lisp and dive fairly deeply into an implementation of John McCarthy’s original vision as described in his seminal paper “Recursive functions of symbolic […]

Games of interest: Zendo

I recently held a Zendo unsession at the 2014 Strange Loop conference in St. Louis and described the game as the scientific method in a box. While perhaps too general, I believed that the tech, mathematical, and scientific-minded crowd at Strange Loop would appreciate the game very much. However, before I talk about the unsession, […]

A Near Sure Thing in Computer Science

There is nothing new under the sun.1 See: every computer science book written between 1950 and 2000.2 ↩ Hat-tip to Michael Bernstein ↩

Games of interest: Catchup

Nick Bentley‘s Catchup is a game that I’ve only recently played, but that has captured my imagination in a big way. If you’ve read this blog for any significant amount of time then you might have noticed that I like to talk about programming languages and the process of creating them. With this in mind […]