Some may call it “pointless”, but I absolutely love the point-free tacit programming style . The level of brevity can be truly astounding! Some of the terseness comes from not having to mention parameter names all over the place and much of...

[Note: I/O has now been added ] My son is completely obsessed with Minecraft . It’s an amazing game and the way he plays it, it really nurtures extreme creativity. I honestly haven’t been able to get into it myself but I was pretty intrigued by the ComputerCraft...

Mads Torgersen’s post the other day was very cool! The first time I really understood Lambda Calculus was from this little 8-page paper . Relating it to Scheme made it stick for me. After reading Dr. T’s post I was just now having some fun playing with...

[Part 1 of the FScheme series ] One of my New Year’s goals is to re-read Lisp in Small Pieces and implement all 11 interpreters and 2 compilers. As much as I like the "Lisp in Lisp" idea and enjoyed the eureka moment in SICP when Sussman writes...

[Part 1 of the HP Calc series ] I recently started a super-geeky side hobby of collecting vintage calculators and got my hands on a pair of HP calcs. The more I learned about the internals of the devices, the more intrigued I was. Jacques Laporte...

[The first in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] I’ve been enthralled by retro computing recently and have been filling my bookshelf [yes, actual bound paper books] with (nearly) extinct programming language topics: Lisp, Fortran...

I’ve been having some fun playing with the Kinect SDK and the Lego NXT kit . The protocol to talk to the Lego brick over Bluetooth is pretty straight forward. Below is a little F# module for most of the basic commands. I’ll fill out the full set soon...

[Part 3 of the HP Calc series ] In this post, we’ll create a 96-line F# emulator for the HP-35 calculator with which we’ll run the 960 byte (!) ROM image. As you may well know, I am a calculator freak. The 40-year-old HP-35 is an especially...

I remember the strange feeling as a kid the first time I saw structured BASIC after having been doing everything with line numbers. Any time I happened to walk into a Radio Shack in the early 80s I’d just have to leave this behind:   I was in a GOTO...

[Part 2 of the HP Calc series ] Making the JavaScript-based HP-35 microcode emulator has been a fun little project. Last time we disassembled the original bits from the ROM. I say “disassemble” but really our microcode instructions were...

Don Syme blogged this quite some years ago but it just came up in a design review on my team this afternoon and it bears repeating. let memoize f = let cache = new Dictionary <_,_> () ( fun x -> match cache.TryGetValue x with | true , res...

[Part 10 of the FScheme series ] We’re into one of the most magical chapters in Bill Hails’ book . We’re about to add a very strange and dangerous feature to the interpreter: ‘call/cc’ (“call with current continuation”...

Stephen Wolfram ’s book, “ A New Kind of Science ” is flippin’ brilliant! (or perhaps I'm just not brilliant enough to realize he's a mad man) 1,280 pages packed with beautiful insights and Tufte-worthy visualizations. I remember...

Our team’s been doing Katas to get the hang of TDD. One such kata ( calculating bowling scores ) struck me as insanely simple with pattern matching in F#: let rec score acc = function | 10 :: (a :: b :: _ as t) -> score (acc + 10 + a + b)...

Brushing up on “whiteboard coding” for internal interviews… Inspired by Hal Ableson’s streams-based solution to this old classic in the SICP lectures, here’s a pretty concise n-Queens solution: let rec Solutions n...

[The sixth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] There’s beginning to be more Forth than F# in these posts! The last major piece we’re missing in the language, aside from some compile-time trickery we’ll get into later...

[I wrote this almost 14 years ago (20 FEB 1996. Today is 27 SEP 2009). Some of it is embarrassingly naïve, but I was just a (25 year old) punk kid back then. I was quite the anti-Microsoft/Intel, Java-head back then. It’s funny that despite...

[The eighth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] They say that the inner interpreter is the heart of Forth and outer interpreter is the soul. It’s time to give TransForth a heart transplant! To really understand what we’re...

[The eleventh in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] If you think coding with punch cards is old school, you should try using sandstone tablets! Legend has it that members of the Cult of the Bound Variable designed and may have even...

[Part 3 of the FScheme series ] Continuing along in Bill Hails’ book . Be sure to follow the previous posts . Lambda Now we’re going to add the all-powerful ‘lambda’! Since we’ve already done all the environment...

[The fifth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] Sadly (or happily), we’ve come to a point at which we need to begin thinking like an assembly programmer in order to appreciate the mechanics of Forth’s control flow...

Longest hailstone sequence with starting number under one-million. let hailstone n = Seq.unfold ( function 0L -> None | 1L -> Some(1L, 0L)                                     ...

Largest products of five consecutive digits in this 1000-digit number. open System.Numerics let digits n = Seq.unfold ( fun i – > if i = 0I then None else Some(i % 10I, i / 10I)) n let consecutive = Seq.unfold ( function (a : BigInteger) ...

What do you think this “code” does? 0(1adf89r)720x Well, it’s a ridiculously terse, stack-based Logo-like language with single character commands. Beginning with 0, it repeatedly (720 times) increments the top stack value and moves forward by that amount...

First ten digits of sum of following one-hundred 50-digit numbers. It would be interesting to do without BigInts. Could use doubles with enough precision for just the first ten digits or some such thing, but just wanted the correct answer to plug into...