https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/list/ Recent content in List on Hillel Wayne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/ Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/ The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what “significant in history” means. So let’s talk about some “mostly dead” languages and why they matter so much. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/a-bunch-of-tests/ Mon, 02 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/a-bunch-of-tests/ I’ve been working on a bunch of longform obligation pieces and while they’re a lot of fun, they’re also steadily driving me insane. So I took a day off to write about all of the kinds of automated testing I know about. I’m defining tests here to be “an independent verification program that, as part of verification, executes the code we want to verify.” This means types are not tests, as they don’t involve execution of the code, and contracts are not tests, because they’re not executed as an independent program. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/list-of-tla-examples/ Thu, 08 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/list-of-tla-examples/ People always tell me that the hardest part of learning TLA+ is finding good examples. This makes sense to me: most of the main ones out there are either toy problems or immensely complex algorithms. It’s sort of the nature of TLA+: if you’re using it, you’re trying to design something complicated, and that’s usually because you’re trying to sell something complicated. Also, the community is tiny. You could probably fit all of the TLA+ experts in the world in a small coffee shop. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/monad-tutorials/ Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/monad-tutorials/ “Mathematics doesn’t have a sense of time, but often we need to track time. So programmers borrow an idea from the field of formal logic and replace all functions (f: A → B) ↦ f: A × T → B where T is the partially ordered set t1 ... tn. If T is totally ordered we can then define a mutation as a tuple in M ⊆ Var × Val × Val × T such that <x, a, b, t> ∈ M ⇔ x[b, t'] ∈ x'[a, t]. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/important-women-in-cs/ Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/important-women-in-cs/ I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace. Can’t we think of someone else for once? I went ahead and compiled a bunch of really important women according to some fairly arbitrary rules: There’s a specific thing you can point to and say “That. That’s their contribution.” This leaves out a lot of really qualified people who made lots of general contributions, but I wanted to keep this list fixed on soundbites.