OH so like a functional programmer to not have class consciousness

I don't normally post my email newsletter, but I thought this one was a banger: on the dualities between constructor injection, the reader monad, comonads, and effect handlers. If that sounds like your jam: buttondown.com/functionalpr... (Or just grab the book! functionalprogrammingstrategies.com)

come join us again @feelingof.london for demos and good vibes! 😌💚

🎯🎯🎯 "When you start to treat an LLM with cruelty, the only thing you're really revealing is what you have in your heart, not whether the machine has one... Practicing this language - even toward AI - normalizes the social patterns that enable cruelty toward humans."

AGI is when everyone is using emacs

I wrote up my recent exploration of OxCaml: noelwelsh.com/posts/a-quic... This is a quick overview, and an example and discussion of unboxed types. More to follow, if time allows!

Got my website running live on my zero-allocation (ish) OxCaml webserver! First of a series of posts on building out our planetary computing system infrastructure using the performance extensions in the Jane Street fork of OCaml. anil.recoil.org/notes/oxcaml... (and thanks @thenumb.at for tips)

For five years I convinced myself I was a boring Linux user who would stick with Ubuntu. One week ago I cracked, installed Arch, and now I'm onto my second window manager (Niri) and in love with tweaking little dotfiles (and keyboard oriented workflows)

¡ʎɐp ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ ʎddɐH Getting ready for the traditional Australia Day barbie! 🇦🇺🐨🦘🪃🪰🦈🐊🐍🕷️

Used OxCaml unboxed types to create a very simple arithmetic interpreter with ~zero allocation. The documentation is lacking but the overall vision is compelling! I find it more ergonomic to work with than Rust; there is a very gentle slope from writing normal GC'ed code to optimized code.

Thanks for some help from @jonoabroad.bsky.social, Doodle now supports tags and attributes in SVG drawings! A few examples here in the documentation: www.creativescala.org/doodle/svg/t...

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

Yesterday Evening, I gave a talk about using #Haskell for #3DPrinting at the London #Scala User Group @londonscala.bsky.social https:// doscienceto.it/cad-talk-scala/

Finished the chapter on types in the book! This was a fun one. Got to revisit the @lexi-lambda.bsky.social classic "Parse, don't validate" and waffle a bit about extensional versus intensional view points. This duality comes up surprisingly often! It's the same thing as FP (data) vs OO (codata).

Early Christmas present from me if you're reading this and you're a: - Senior web developer - In London - Really into books and libraries - Looking for work rn I am excited to inform you that the British Library is hiring a new head of web development ce0752li.webitrent.c...

This is how you nerd!

@kubukoz.mstdn.party.ap.brid.gy made this very nice video about the web framework I've been working on in my spare time: youtu.be/lY88Z1JnUpI You should check it out! (The framework itself is at www.creativescala.org/krop/)

🧪 Streaming can feel intimidating until you see it broken down clearly. This talk takes a deep dive into fs2 with a focus on real usage. Here’s "Taking the plunge: a deep dive into streaming with fs2" by Zainab Ali

Get your #Haskell fix at the London #Scala User Group! We're excited to hear from Joe Warren, creator of the 3D printed London Scala User Group logo.

The festive season is upon us and we have something special... a Christmas social event on Dec 12th (Fri) at the Science Museum!! 🎄 Come for some drinks (free entry, sign up required) or Power Up and enjoy a night of fun retro games 🎮🤖 (£20). Details below 🧵

The more complicated types become, the more value there is in writing them down. The more complicated types become, the less I want to write them down. Such is the duality of programming.

“The Software Paper fills a gap for the computational and digital humanities communities...” Thank you to research software engineer extraordinaire @suttonkoeser.bsky.social for leading this initiative for Computational Humanities Research journal. Please share!

This is in collaboration with @scalabridgelondon.bsky.social . If you're in London and Scala / FP inclined it would be great to see you there!

The French just keep raising the heist bar.

This "Tiger Style" coding philosophy reminds me of 1990s / early 2000s era Code Complete advice: tigerstyle.dev For example: the only discussion of types is "use explicitly sized types" but then we have a big section on implementing an ad-hoc runtime "type" / contract system using assertions.

We love to visit our local French fry restaurant. The maitre d' is always happy to suggest the best sauce to complement the season's potatoes. The chef, however, is very passionate about food and has been known to leave the kitchen to shout at customers who ask for their fries "well done".

Thoughts on the Cloudflare incident [1] from a PL perspective. Some file had an implicit limit of 200 lines. If this could be typed checked that would be great. Types are cheap and prevent all instances of a problem. [1]: blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-...

XML as syntax for a programming language was a bad idea in Ant back in the early 2000s, and it's still a bad idea in the CSL I'm working on now. (Same thing applies to YAML, modulo changing the years.)

After fixing up a bunch of citations (DBLP saved me with the ACM being unusable due to the Cloudflare incident) I think I can make the Typst version of Functional Programming Strategies live, replacing the older Latex version. I'll never use Latex again if I can help it. Another win for FP! 😆

Reworking some of the bibliographical notes in Functional Programming Strategies, and I discovered that regular expression derivatives are behind the current .NET regex engine, and a best-in-class Rust engine! E.g. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... It's nice when theory matches up with practice. 😁

Judging by the errors I'm seeing across the Internet, can we now say CloudFlare is the new AWS?

Our next #Scala #OpenSource Hack Night on Nov 19th (Wed) will be held at Medidata, starting at 6pm! Come and enjoy a night of fun hacking & learning! Sign up here: 🌟 www.meetup.com/london-scala...

Finished updating the applicatives chapter in Functional Programming Strategies[1], meaning one chapter left to complete the migration from Latex to Typst[2]. Only a few chapters of content to go before the book is complete! [1]: scalawithcats.com [2]: Complete enough to publish a draft.

Struth! As if it wasn't hard enough dodging the venomous snakes, the venomous spiders, the venomous fish, the venomous octopi, the Great Whites, and the drop bears, ancient Aussies also had to dodge drop crocs! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

What in the SML?! I find myself again writing code that uses self types (and type refinements!) to compose modules of code. A few years ago I would have said this was very esoteric. I still think it's very esoteric, but also useful! But why? What's the underlying pattern?

Saw a few posts today about restrictive open source licenses. Some prevent competition (e.g. Elastic License). Others prevent people in certain industries from using the software (e.g. military) Summarized, the posts were "OMG, why are you forcing your politics on me". This is a stupid take.

Our next Scala Talks event is happening on Nov 12 (Wed) at Depop! We have some international speakers! Agnès Cardin will share her experience publishing a Scala book, and Maciej Gorywoda will show us how Jetbrain's AI tools can help you write Scala! Sign up here: www.meetup.com/london-scala...

After reading old programming language papers, I feel obligated to report that Miranda is a trademark of Research Software Limited.

Does JavaScript….go hard?!??

Amazing what a few years of experience does. Just simplified some fs2 + Cats Effect code into about 1/3 the number of lines of just fs2 code. The increased clarity in the code reflects the increased clarity in my head over the approximately 6 years since I started that code.

Staging is the number one PL feature I'd like to see move from academia to industry. For example, configuration / dependency injection is vastly simplified with staging. There are limited forms in some current languages (e.g. comptime in Zig) but they aren't sufficiently expressive.

What's the best file watcher in Scala? So far I've found: - sbt. Not sure about using sbt as a library dependency. - Play. Should be well tested, but maybe old? - fs2. Documented to the usual fs2 standard (i.e. not at all) but should integrate with the CE codebase Any thoughts?

I'm only 6 chapters into Katabasis, but so far it is a heck of a lot of fun. I think anyone who has been involved in academia will enjoy. How could you not enjoy a story whose premise is two graduate students' journey into hell to rescue their advisor?

For the last year or two, most of the books I've "read" have been audiobooks. Spotify has a good selection, and it's easy to squeeze an hour or so of listening into the day, when doing chores, or exercise that doesn't involve too much movement. Not all books work this way, but it's good for many.

The term "vibe coding" raises an important question: what exactly is coding? In my last newsletter I argue that coding is very narrowly defined, as just getting ideas already crystal clear in your brain into source code.

A reminder that Scalabridge London is back on from tomorrow! A truly great opportunity to get to know amazing people and work on interesting projects to master Scala and functional programming! Sign up here if you want to join us: www.meetup.com/scalabridge-...

A few years back some companies banned "politics at work". There is no useful definition of politics that excludes normal workplace activities, so this ban is simply a hammer that those with power can arbitrarily deploy against those without. This is the same, but on a much wider scale.

3/ Tech fascism in a nutshell: “Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.“ She wrote this in 2000!