Last week I said that this week's newsletter would be a brief history of algebraic data types. I was wrong. That history is now a 3500 word blog post....| buttondown.com
Greetings everyone! You might have noticed that it's September and I don't have the next version of Logic for Programmers ready. As penance, here's ten free copies of the book. So a few months ago I wrote a newsletter about how we use nondeterminism in formal methods. The overarching idea: Nondeterminism is when multiple paths are possible from a starting state. A system preserves a property if it holds on all possible paths. If even one path violates the property, then we have a bug. An intu...| Computer Things
More techniques from the math mines| buttondown.com
Use the right tool for the job.| buttondown.com
Linguistics is about human languages, not programming ones| buttondown.com
New Logic for Programmers Release! v0.11 is now available! This is over 20% longer than v0.10, with a new chapter on code proofs, three chapter overhauls, and more! Full release notes here. Software books I wish I could read I'm writing Logic for Programmers because it's a book I wanted to have ten years ago. I had to learn everything in it the hard way, which is why I'm ensuring that everybody else can learn it the easy way. Books occupy a sort of weird niche in software. We're great at shar...| Computer Things
I'm a big (neo)vim buff. My config is over 1500 lines and I regularly write new scripts. I recently ported my neovim config to a new laptop. Before then, I was using VSCode to write, and when I switched back I immediately saw a big gain in productivity. People often pooh-pooh vim (and other assistive writing technologies) by saying that writing code isn't the bottleneck in software development. Reading, understanding, and thinking through code is! Now I don't know how true this actually is in...| Computer Things
History, updates, metrics, and next steps.| buttondown.com
I realize that for all I've talked about Logic for Programmers in this newsletter, I never once explained basic logical quantifiers. They're both simple and incredibly useful, so let's do that this week! Sets and quantifiers A set is a collection of unordered, unique elements. {1, 2, 3, …} is a set, as are "every programming language", "every programming language's Wikipedia page", and "every function ever defined in any programming language's standard library". You can put whatever you wan...| Computer Things
TDD Gone Wrong (Gone Z3xual)| buttondown.com
For sure easier than solving it in SAT!| buttondown.com
There has never been a better time to learn formal specification.| buttondown.com
An explainer for people who don't know computer science and are mildly curious| buttondown.com
Clever code is a bad idea 95% of the time, this is the other 5%| buttondown.com
Short one this time because I have a lot going on this week. In computation complexity, NP is the class of all decision problems (yes/no) where a potential proof (or "witness") for "yes" can be verified in polynomial time. For example, "does this set of numbers have a subset that sums to zero" is in NP. If the answer is "yes", you can prove it by presenting a set of numbers. We would then verify the witness by 1) checking that all the numbers are present in the set (~linear time) and 2) addin...| Computer Things
Requirements, phase changes, and formal methods.| buttondown.com
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon...| buttondown.com
I have a lot in the works for the this month's Logic for Programmers release. Among other things, I'm completely rewriting the chapter on Logic Programming...| buttondown.com
Logic for Programmers v0.8 now out! The new release has minor changes: new formatting for notes and a better introduction to predicates. I would have rolled it all into v0.9 next month but I like the monthly cadence. Get it here! Betteridge's Law of Software Engineering Specialness In There is No Automatic Reset in Engineering, Tim Ottinger asks: Do the other people have to live with January 2013 for the rest of their lives? Or is it only engineering that has to deal with every dirty hack sin...| Computer Things
Or: why test-first development is not the same as test-driven development| buttondown.com
I know I said we'd be back to normal newsletters this week and in fact had 80% of one already written. Then I unearthed something that was better left...| buttondown.com
Or four kinds, or six kinds, I'm not picky about how you count them| buttondown.com
I occasionally receive emails asking me to look at the writer's new language/library/tool. Sometimes it's in an area I know well, like formal methods. Other times, I'm a complete stranger to the field. Regardless, I'm generally happy to check it out. When starting out, this is the biggest question I'm looking to answer: What does this technology make easy that's normally hard? What justifies me learning and migrating to a new thing as opposed to fighting through my problems with the tools I a...| Computer Things
First of all, I just released version 0.6 of Logic for Programmers! You can get it here. Release notes in the footnote.1 I've been thinking about my next project after the book's done. One idea is to do a survey of new formal specification languages. There's been a lot of new ones in the past few years (P, Quint, etc), plus some old ones I haven't critically examined (SPIN, mcrl2). I'm thinking of a brief overview of each, what's interesting about it, and some examples of the corresponding mo...| Computer Things
Building an intuition for the mathematics behind the "TLA" in "TLA+"| buttondown.com
Just an unordered collections of thoughts on this. In programming languages, nondeterminism tends to come from randomness, concurrency, or external forces...| buttondown.com
Why are scalable systems locally-inefficent, and locally-efficient systems unscalable? Plus, new book release!| buttondown.com
"Stronger" tests are better for determining correctness, while "weaker" tests are useful for localizing errors.| buttondown.com
It's too cold to go outside, so let's talk juggling.| buttondown.com
All languages have numbers, booleans, strings, and lists. What else is out there?| buttondown.com
