Category: General

Programming is not just engineering — it is design. All my hopes and beliefs about programming boil down to that one assertion, which has become my main cause. The misunderstanding of programming as engineering has many pernicious effects, infecting our tools, technologies, and practices. Computer Science embodies this fallacy in its very name. Therefore I have banded together with some other programming language researchers and developers to form the IFIP Working Group 2.16 on Programming Language Design.
Continue reading “A win for design”

We have ignition: an actual implementation of an actual language. Toy-like in the extreme, but it can run the sorts of simple examples I have been discussing the last few years. I think I can take it all the way to a prototype application framework. This is huge progress.
Continue reading “It’s a good day to code”

It’s great to be coding again, after spending so long lost in thought and theory. This has been my longest break from programming since I started at 13. I now have a working virtual machine that supports the essential semantics of the language. The next step is a compiler. The good thing about having a long break from programming is that it made the experience of starting up again quite vivid. What was most vivid was the many ways I make programming needlessly harder for myself. Continue reading “Delusions of Programming”

My experiment with Scala is not working out. It’s just not ready for prime time, and is overkill for my needs. Reluctantly, I am falling back to Java. Continue reading “Switching to Plan J”

Programming is deeply disappointing. We continually fail to live up to our own expectations, more so than any other form of engineering or craft. And it’s not getting much better. The lack of any substantial progress is the most disappointing thing of all. Worst of all: it is our own fault.
Continue reading “For the good of software, software must die!”