I am having a great time reading Smullyan’s Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, a thin volume with the most elegant description of Gödel’s and Tarski’s work i’ve read so far. It’s also the most succint, and it starts with a very nice and very clear demonstration of indecidability that is the simplest i have ever seen. I like it a lot, and it’s short enough for a quick blog post. Here it goes.

Last October Don Stewart gave a very interesting talk at CodeNode on his experience using Haskell at a large scale. And by large, he means millions of lines of code. Although he wasn’t allowed to talk about the very specifics of the code, his talk is full of interesting remarks that i found resonate with my experience. They actually convinced me that the next language i should try in production should be OCaml.

To follow twitter, i connect to a local Bitlbee server via emacs, using the Circe IRC client, and i browse the web using emacs-w3m.

I needed a command to automatically tweet about the page i am visiting. This being the emacs environment, i just wrote it in elisp.

Recently i bought a second-hand copy of Simon Peyton Jones’ classic The implementation of functional programming languages, and i’ve been having some very pleasant reading hours during the last week.

For instance, i’ve enjoyed Simon’s clear and to-the-point introduction to the lambda calculus and, more concretely, his really lucid explanation of the workings of recursion and the Y combinator. As a matter of fact, i’ve enjoyed it so much that i just wanted to briefly reproduce it here, paraphrased in my surely poorer style, just for the fun of it.

For many years, i’ve been convinced that programming needs to move forward and abandon the Algol family of languages that, still today, dampens the field. And that that forward direction has been signalled for decades by (mostly) functional, possibly dynamic languages with an immersive environment. But it wasn’t until recently that i was able to finally put my money where my mouth has been all these years.

I’m pretty sure one of the main reasons programmers write blogs is using them as yet another excuse to tinker with their favourite languages and tools: i know one of them quite well.