There are only two problems in computer science: cache invalidation and fending off the keyboard-eating alligator

Short newsletter this week because I am sick and unmotivated. Possibility properties in formal methods, featuring special guest @mat4nier.bsky.social 's computer buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Can someone explain why so many vibe slop websites start with a table of contents? It's been my most reliable signal that something is slop

Did I ever talk about how much I love Clark Ashton Smith? He's like Lovecraft except ten times funnier and only a third as racist

Help me settle an IRL argument. Imagine we could construct magic boxes, no bigger than a cubic meter in volume, that altered the flow of time inside them when shut. Would it be more revolutionary to society if the boxes A) slowed down time by 100x or B) sped up time by 100x?

In the past year I went from never eating herring to it being a breakfast staple. Goddamn I love herring

Day three of quitting all forms of scrolling cold turkey: damn this sucks

Wrote a bit about the changes to and timeline for finishing Logic for Programmers in the newsletter buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

After four months of edits and multiple mental breakdowns, I am delighted to announce the release of *Logic for Programmers* v0.13! All content is in, all that's left is copyediting (and technical editing and layout and proofreading and) logicforprogrammers.com

I used to pride myself in how fast I could code up scripts. When I can bash out an automation in half an hour, I write a lot more automations and am a lot more productive in the long run. Nowadays that skill has been rendered almost entirely obsolete by LLMs.

Logic for Programmers now has a website! Right now it's just a redirect to the leanpub page but one day it'll have, like, "blurbs" www.logicforprogrammers.com

Man a proof that 2 + 4 + 6 + ... + 2*n = n*(n+1) is a lot easier to follow than a proof that (1 + 2 + 3 + ... n) = n*(n+1)/2, even though both are the exact same proof with the exact same meaning

Of course the longest chapter is on predatory logic

Logic for Programmers has now passed 50,000 words, making it officially the longest text I have ever written.

One of the things that's driving me crazy with the book is I see this great connection between the Liskov Substitution principle, database data models, and formal spec refinements, but I'm struggling to clearly convey it in the book. And now I'm worried that I'm writing it for me and not the reader

I'm speaking at Software Should Work in July 16! Really pumped to not have to travel overseas for once :) softwareshould.work

I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book

Jesus Christ, AI journalism is so bad right now. Exhibit one, Gizmodo is raving about an article that 'proves' LLMs have a "mathematical limit" and can't possibly do tasks that are too complex. Let's look at the actual paper, shall we? gizmodo.com/ai-agents-ar...

Wait so is the whole problem with ORMs that database tables are not the data model?! IE if you have tables `users` and `user_addresses`, the ORM will think that those are two separate objects, when the DB is implementing the intended data model "users have a list of addresses as an attribute"

My favorite thing about cooking is how it regularly permanently improves your life. Couple weeks back I learned that Chilaquiles are super easy to make and now my life is just a little bit better

My chapter on databases is now longer than my chapter on software contracts and this makes me irrationally mad

Does a SQL database table correspond to a type? Does a data model implemented as records in multiple tables correspond to a type? I kinda wanna say yes to both

I recently read "the lost art of XML" (marcosmagueta.com/blog/the-los...), which argues that developers prefer JSON purely out of convenience, and XML is the superior choice in most instances. I like and use XML, but think there's also good reasons why JSON won out.

Two years to go!

I think this will do what you want within a sandbox (call/2 is as dangerous as eval in Python or Lisp): filecheck(high_churn, Problem, File) :- high_churn(Problem, File). filecheck(untested_commit, Problem, File) :- untested_commit(Problem, File).

Fuck it, going all in. We're making this happen

Why are Venn diagrams of SQL joins misleading? Let me count the ways: 1. The inner join is the intersection of A and B. But A and B are different types, so the intersection should be empty! 2. The left outer join is the whole circle A, so... what's B even doing there at all?

I am far more willing to trust an expert who has a love-hate relationship with their specialty than one who just has a love relationship

Finally managed to untangle a major Prolog conundrum in Logic for Programmers, of how not to require readers to understand a four-rule recursive predicate I found a one rule version that takes 1/5th the explanation. Only problem is it doesn't work in SWISH (the try-it-online) swish.swi-prolog.org

New Newsletter! This is about me trying to teach specification refinement without using specifications buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

YAML is actually an okay data format for personal tooling

Logic for Programmers is two weeks away from copyediting and I just thought of an amazing addition that would unify liskov subtyping, specification refinement, and databases So if I can get EVERYTHING ELSE done in time...

Folks are this introduces "another point of failure." There's a subtle point in SRE here which I think can best be summed up by, "Failure points don't all exist on one dimension." Sometimes we expect a minor increase in failure rate on one axis to introduce a dramatic improvement on another.

Okay bsky, I need some book advice! Currently Logic for Programmers has about 100 links, and some of them are long like www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear.... I was thinking of replacing them with stuff like logicforprogrammers.com/url/code-churn, which would all redirect to the final links. Yay/nay?

I've got a big fan

You can get your own spinning avvie by following these instructions! gist.github.com/hwayne/51150...

Windows 11 updates reaaaaaally bringing me to my breaking point Someone please convert AutoHotKey to ubuntu so I can free myself of this OS

I have some complaints about Prolog. I have many complaints about Prolog. I wrote up *most* of my complaints about Prolog in this week's newsletter: buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Reading "logic for programmers" by @hillelwayne.com I love how it articulates the relationship between types, tests, contracts.

Finally trying to add Constraint Logic Programming to Logic for Programmers. As part of due diligence I also looked into Answer Set Programming... and now I'm not even sure if I want to cover CLP? ASP just seems like a much more important topic

TIL SQLite doesn't automatically enforce foreign key constraints. You gotta add `PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;`

@obsidian.md has accomplished the impossible feat of being a knowledge management software I've stuck with for more than a month

TIL it's not true that "cake mixes added an egg so housewives would feel like they did something." They added an egg because eggless cake mixes sucked. (To make housewives feel like they did something, companies suggested making multilayered frosted cakes with mixes) www.snopes.com/fact-check/s...

Clean coders would literally rather give functions misleading names than write informative comments

Next month's version of Logic for Programmers (leanpub.com/logic/) is so far 46k words, making it the second longest individual work I've every written and on track to beat my longest individual work (A NaNoWriMo I did when I was twelve)

New year, new newsletter! This one's all about the Liskov Substitution Principle and how it applies to more than just object oriented programming! buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Last newsletter of the year! This one's light and just covers a few of the Fun Facts I know about software. Happy holidays and enjoy! buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

From now until the end of the year, you can get Logic for Programmers $10 off! Use the code `hannukah-presents` or just click this link: leanpub.com/logic/c/hann...

BTW if you're in Chicago I'm speaking at the Cloud Computing Meetup Group tomorrow evening www.meetup.com/the-chicago-...

Thanks to everybody who donated to the Feedchicago fundraiser! We raised a total of $2250 for @fooddepository.bsky.social. I donated last week to leverage a Giving Tuesday 2x match so it's $6750 total