That's the title of my presentation at Dog Food Conference 2014, 29-30 September, in Columbus, Ohio. If you found my post on "Test-Only Development" with the Z3 Theorem Prover was interesting, then you'll love this. What if simply writing "unit tests" was enough to produce a program which makes them pass? What if your compiler could guarantee that your OpenSSL replacement follows the TLS specification to the letter? What if you could write a test which showed that your code had no unintention...

This is the fifth post of my notes from Emerging Languages Camp last year. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to read the Introduction to this series. Axiomatic Language Walter Wilson Homepage · Slides · Presentation One of the ways that you can describe a coding style is declarative versus imperative. That is, focusing on the desired result versus focusing on how that result should be computed, respectively. Walter Wilson's axiomatic language attempts to take the former approa...

This is the third post of my notes from Emerging Languages Camp last year. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to read the Introduction to this series. Noether: Symmetry in Programming Language Design Daira Hopwood Slides · Presentation I found this presentation to be at once fascinating and frustrating. It was the single best talk at ELC in terms of changing how I think about programming languages. To whatever degree I went to ELC in order to learn and change my thinking about ...

In this exciting installment of my notes from Emerging Languages Camp last year, some information about the Daimio and Babel programming languages. If you haven't seen it already, you might want to read the Introduction to this series. Daimio: A Language for Sharing Dann Toliver Homepage · Presentation · Slides Daimio Is a domain-specific language for customization of web applications. Dann Toliver, the presernter, says that web applications should be extensible and extensions should be sh...

Emerging Languages Camp is an all day event held before Strange Loop. There were 11 presentations on new and unusual programming languages in varying stages of development. Production-ready languages like C#, Ruby, Clojure, and Haskell don't just spring to life out of nothing. There exists a historical context of major language families (Algol, LISP, ML, etc.) as well as a "primordial soup" of amateur, research, and proof-of-concept experiments which allow for features well outside the patter...

Cloud Security, For Real This Time: Homomorphic Encryption and the Future of Data Privacy. That's the title of my presentation at the next Central Ohio OWASP Quarterly Seminar, on 27 February at 1:00 p.m. Dan King, from Microsoft, will be talking about single sign-on for federated Dynamics CRM, very practical stuff which is in real world use today. I, on the other hand, will be talking about technologies which don't quite exist in fully practical forms today, but which I predict will change the ...

I had an interesting bug in my compiler: The parser would fail on blank lines. To a certain degree, this makes sense; the formal grammar of the language does not include blank lines. This is invalid input! On the other hand, every programming language ever invented, as far as I know, simply ignores them. That sounds simple, but, as the author of the compiler, it is necessary to ask: Where is the correct place to ignore a blank line? Compiler textbooks and classes tend to divide compiler archi...

I'm building a small compiler for a toy language which emits .NET executables, implemented in F#. Demo compilers are a dime a dozen, but there are a few things which make this project distinct: No lexer or parser generators are used. The entire compiler is written from the ground up, and is intended to be fairly simple code. The source code is idiomatic F#, and is almost totally purely functional. The project started as a fairly simple port of Jack Crenshaw's code from his classic serie...

Coursera, Udacity, MIT Open Courseware, and other such sites are useful to me because they decouple the desire to learn college-level material from the expense and regulations of earning (another) diploma. The latter isn't compelling to me today, but the former certainly is. I've now taken three Coursera courses: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Social Network Analysis, and Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra Through Computer Science Applications. I also tried to take Calculus: Singl...

Yesterday's New York Times has a good article on Google's analysis of what works and what does not work when interviewing candidates for technical jobs. This paragraph closely matches my experience: Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak...