After several weeks (running into months) of blog silence, here is a post.

I have been busy. Been teaching myself several new things. Life in Bloomington has been good on the whole.

Several good things have happened in life. I am on the verge of finishing my first formal paper in computer science. I have been teaching myself how think in formal terms, not just as a programmer, but like a computer scientist. It is an interesting process.

My first paper should be about the yield operator – it turned out that what was idle tinkering and curiosity over the past few years actually seems to have given rise to something of theoretical value. The paper has some formalizations of things, reference implementations, comparison with existing operators and such. Looks like I just may have enough material for a follow up paper as well.

I have an interesting summer job. I am going to be (finally) at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. I am going to be an intern working with Simon Marlow and at this time it looks like I will be working on a parallel garbage collector for Haskell. It should be good fun to get back to writing systems code for a change.

I have seen so many things in code that I am unsure of code that I write these days. I keep seeing demons in my code. Most of the time I don’t code. When I do, and I intend to use it, it is usually in some extreme language – ruby being one extreme and Haskell being the other. I am afraid of what code I will actually write, when I get down to it and if I actually think about the code. There is an interesting Phil Wadler paper titled “Imperative Functional Programming” – I am afraid that if you give me C these days code I write maybe better described as Functional Imperative Programming. Maybe not that bad though.. at heart I think I am still an imperative programmer – a little shaken, but I can still see the machine execute in my head.

I also spent sometime writing a little book. It is incomplete, but I offer it for download here. If you are the sort, do read it for the fun of it and give me feedback. My intention is to add for text and add more machines and make it a more complete “little” book.

It is a book about abstract machines – machines that will teach you the essence of programming languages and constructs. It shows you how several constructs work in a concise formal way to the extend that you can take the definitions in the book, apply the syntax of your favorite language to it and create your own interpreters and potentially your own programming languages.

The Little Machines

Thats all for now. More when time allows.

ps. If you have any suggestions about places to visit in the UK and such let me know. I am looking for interesting things to do in the time I can take away from work.