language

  • Symbols in computer science

    Computer scientists need a system of symbols to simplify and unify the expression of concepts, and thereby reduce the complexity of the development process. Programmers have been stuck using the same symbols as typists for 50 years, because, in the beginning, it was expensive to make a separate keyboard for programming and for typing,…

  • Haskell and functions

    The following is a pair of commands in Haskell that creates a list of numbers and performs a calculation on that list to generate a new list. This is called a list-comprehension. The first statement can be read as Define list_1to100 as a list from 1 to 100, but don’t actually generate a list…

  • “Set Membership” Symbol Redesign

    Set Theory In high school and college math courses, we learn about ways to express groups of items as subsets and supersets. This branch of mathematics is called set theory. The expression, X ∈ A means “Item X exists in set A”, or “X is an element of set A”. The symbol looks like…

  • The Future of Programming

    In 2019, during my research into finding or making a dream language, I gave a presentation and prepared a slideshow at the local .NET User Group about the history and future of programming. The presentation covers the early history of programming paradigms and the evolution of C-like languages from Label/Goto jump statements to the…

  • First thoughts on Angular and Typescript

    Today, I looked at a friend’s web project written in Angular 2. I had visited his web app the day before, and it was a relatively simple web app where a young child could do basic arithmetic problems. I opened his repository and immediately was greeted with the most obnoxious number of files possible.…