That took much longer than I’d hoped it would; a number of family crises had to be managed in the last year but they’re all sorted and the book is at the printer now! And only about 20 years after … Continue reading →

Scott Hanselman, the Microsoft VP for developer community outreach and general all around good guy was kind enough to ask me to be on his podcast, HanselMinutes, to talk about my upcoming book. I was delighted to spend a few … Continue reading →

Hey everyone, I first want to say a heartfelt thank you so much for the warm comments and supportive feedback I’ve gotten since I announced that I’m in process of writing Fabulous Adventures In Data Structures And Algorithms. It means … Continue reading →

Hey everyone, I’ve finally turned this blog into a book! Or, rather, I am deep in the process of turning this blog into a book. Yes, it’s about 20 years, give or take, after I first thought of doing so, … Continue reading →

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 →