EDUCATION AND LEARNING
In Memoriam: John W. Addison Jr, my Phd Advisor. [4200 views]
John Addison (1930–2025) died March 7, 2025, at the age of 95. He was my PhD advisor at UC Berkeley, and I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have worked under his guidance. My condolences go out to his family. When … Continue reading →
DATABASES AND DATA ENGINEERING
A Functional Approach to Dictionaries
Dictionaries are extremely useful data objects. A dictionary is an associative store, basically a set of key-value pairs. A dictionary takes a key and returns the associated value. Python has dictionaries and the Python engineers have put a lot of … Continue reading →
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS
Functional OO in PyFL [130 views]
For along time I thought about adding object-oriented features to PyFL but couldn’t figure out how. Classes and methods don’t seem to fit into the declarative model, where all objects are immutable. But then I stumbled on an answer almost … Continue reading →
ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC POLICY
PyFL and its While Clauses [160 views]
[This is another excerpt from the paper we were going to submit to ICFP 2025. Unfortunately it was immediately rejected because we included our names, contrary to the instructions that it is anonymous. Sigh] PyFL is a pure and lazy … Continue reading →
BOOKS LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
The Yin and Yang of Programming [3100 views]
[This is from a paper we’re submitting to the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2025)][update: the paper was rejected because we included our names, violating anonymity] Introduction Recursion and iteration are the Yin and Yang of programming. Conventional languages … Continue reading →