Viewing profile — dogfishbar

Retired CS prof here (from a below (ok way-below) top-4 program). There is no longer a job market for CS grads outside of top-4? Is this true? I had no idea, as I understood it, CS…

Sure, OCaml is great as are the other dialects of ML. I'm hoping that someone will weigh in with a compelling case for laziness everywhere or dynamic dispatch everywhere, other tha…

Thanks for letting us tag along. What I'd like to hear are your thoughts on the Groucho Marx cigar question: laziness is useful every now and then, but in lazy languages like Haske…

I've been using simple animations in a CS1 course using the Elmish/model-view-update style in OCaml. In the spring I'll be teaching CS1 in Python. Does anyone know of a reasonable …

Life goal: outlive dynamic type checking.

Lyn T. is one of a small handful of the best CS educators on the planet. Good job HN!

I spent a lot of time on this. See M-LISP: a representation-independent dialect of LISP with reduction semantics, TOPLAS, 1992, the relevant bit is in section 2. It's true that J. …

Robert Heinlein's nephew Terrance Heinlein (Terry) is a brilliant architect. Bob Muller

M-LISP: a representation-independent dialect of LISP with reduction semantics In this paper we introduce M-LISP, a dialect of LISP designed with an eye toward reconciling LISP's me…

I'd like to swap out Comcast for something less predatory. Any suggestions for Boston?

I have been teaching OCaml in CS1 at Boston College for 4 years now. Of hundreds of students who went on to learn Java in our CS2 course (joining Python-trained students from other…

Nice article! But you have a typo. (λx.x y) does not return y, though (\x.x) y does.

I'm teaching a sophomore level web apps course in the spring semester. I'm torn between doing what I think will help them land an internship this summer or land a real job and on t…

Akkartik: the paper of mine that you cited has a bunch of theorems following the program laid out by Gordon Plotkin in the single best paper I ever read: "Call-by-Name, Call-by-Val…

Thank you for reminding me, McCarthy also invented COND which eventually led to the great modern pattern matching forms. An ironic side-story of this that may or may not be of inte…

Fair enough, I felt I was droning on but it's true that I didn't show the key mistake. Here it is. If you want to represent an arbitrary M-expression as an M-expression, it's most …

I published a paper on this in the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) back in 1992. The title was "M-LISP: A Representation-independent Dialect of LISP …

OK, you asked! LISP was originally developed as a language for writing recursive functions of symbolic expressions (S-expressions). It was roughly based on lambda calculus, the lan…

The definition of quote is broken. I personally explained it to John McCarthy. He agreed.

Ha! LISP macros and read both work because of a very simple bug in the original definition of LISP. Don't even bother with it or Scheme or Racket --- they're all utterly broken and…