James Iry

This is my yak. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My yak is my best friend. It is my life. I must shave it as I shaved the ...

In The Point of Laziness , Bob Harper mentioned a core duality between lazy and eager languages1. Eager languages have sum types but not ...

With this post I want to ask a question: what does it mean for code to be "too dense?" This question has implications on everything from la...

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...

This is my yak. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My yak is my best friend. It is my life. I must shave it as I shaved the one before. Without me, my yak is hairy. Without my yak, I am productive. I must shave my yak cleaner than the previous

I managed to offend a few Erlangers by talking about actors as being shared stateful objects a couple of articles back. Now I'm going to co...

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...

It's mostly pretty easy to eliminate null in a language: just replace it with Maybe/Option types. Unfortunately it's only mostly easy to get rid of null that way in class based OO languages. There's one corner where null is surprisingly stubborn without l

Last time I talked about how the Scala compiler currently translates try/catch expressions used as arguments to method or constructor call into separate method definitions which in turn may require boxing of mutable variables. That's because an exception