Elixir has been getting a lot of interest recently. It's a functional, concurrent language that compiles to bytecode for the Erlang VM. As well as concurrency, it has strong support for metaprogramming with hygenic macros — think Scheme but without all the parentheses. The syntax is really p …

A while back I wrote a post called Javascript: the Weird parts primarily for my own amusement. It listed some of my personal favourite wtfjs-type Javascript idiosyncracies. In this post I want to look in more depth at one of those idiosyncracies. I want to investigate exactly why Math.max() is les …

My final day with Elm, at least for now started out a bit challenging. As before, the examples in the book are for elm version 0.13 not 0.14 and there has been enough change that porting the example program across was annoying. But after that, the whole thing became a lot more fun. You see, d …

As it turns out quite a lot has changed in Elm between the release in the book and the current 0.14 version. Which made things more challenging than perhaps I may have liked. Still, it has been a good way of getting to know the documentation. Virtue of necessity and all that.You can find a port of …

I recently chanced across a truly wonderful talk by Guy Steele, one of the creators of the Scheme programming language. He gave the talk at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference, but it touches on some timeless themes in communicating with computers.The talk focusses on the need for us to build languages …

I am pretty excited about the latest installment of my Seven More Languages journey. Elm is a functional reactive programming (FRP) language with an Haskell-like syntax that compiles to Javascript. The idea is to be able to write in a language with a decent type system and support for FRP, without h …

And so on to the final day of the concatenative Factor language. I actually found today a bit more straightforward than day 2. I felt more like I was working with functions and was worrying less about where items were on the stack. I completed most of the exercises but again ran out of time before c …

Once more there’s been a hiatus in my Seven more languages in seven weeks odyssey. This time caused by a large amount of social commitments. I had actually done most of the exercises a couple of weeks ago and not typed them up.Factor is a nice little language and concatenative programming is …

A little interlude since third day of Lua. Today I was playing with Factor, a stack orientated, concatenative programming language with a postfix syntax. You heard me right, Factor’ uses Reverse Polish Notation. Interesting idea.In some ways, I can see how useful being able to compose functi …

Not really an update on my progress on Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks this time. After day 3 of Lua I needed a day off!However, I did find a rather amusing little ASCII art-based promo video for the book which I enjoyed. So I thought I would share. Next instalment will be day 1 of Facto …