You can tell a book is really good if you have that feeling that you wish you d written it yourself. But, I think Nicole Wong has produced a far, far better book that I could ever have done. It is an absolutely brilliant introduction to the family of games known under the name of Mahjong. Continue reading " Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora by Nicole Wong my favourite intro to…
TL;DR There s a very interesting PhD thesis about Chinese players of Mahjong and Roulette in Manchester casinos. The key point for me is that in the main, for mahjong at least, these people are NOT gambling in the sense we e.g. as westerners would first think of, and this shapes how they play. Continue reading "Mahjong are we doing it wrong?"
This article first appeared in PragPub back in 2016. This, what you hold in your hand, was almost the twelth article in my series on modern functional programming, which appeared in PragPub from August 2012. See https://free-variable.org/2017/08/02/my-older-articles-in-pragpub/ for current whereabouts of that material. Some articles also appeared in this book. Despite the title, it s not about…
In recent months, I ve fallen to a particular addiction to the game of Mahjong. I like a range of games, from venerable heavy-weights like Go, through modern classics like Dune, then to the other end with games like Space Poo (my kids used to like it ) But Mahjong hits the spot in a number of Continue reading "Mahjong the best game you don t play (and maybe should)"
I m full of flu and feeling quite grumpy, so what better time to unload on something that often annoys me? Today s target is that aura of righteousness that leads some people to act like tossers (could not find a better word but it seems very apposite here), especially when one expresses contrary opinions. How dare Continue reading "Motherhood and apple pie"
I m slightly pleased to announce that Programming: A PragPub Anthology has now been printed! My box of free copies arrived last week, fortunately coinciding with a parental visit (and gave me a great way to deflect attention away from the shocking state of our garden ) The anthology contains updated versions of three of my articles from Continue reading "The FP Anthology book has just been…
UPDATE: the original links no longer work, but some of the PragPub content from a range of authors is being added to Medium, see https://medium.com/@pragpub. See https://medium.com/search?q=callaghan+pragpub for a list of articles by me which have been uploaded there so far. For convenience (mostly mine), here s a list of the articles I wrote a few Continue reading "My older articles in PragPub"
I m pleased to announce that some of my earlier articles for the PragPub magazine will be published in a new anthology, which is available in Beta (e-Book) now and due to be released in dead-tree format around October. Personal motivations aside, it s an inspired idea from one of the top publishers of technical books to collect together a Continue reading "I ve written part of a book!"
I was recently at a FP-ish meetup group in Newcastle, and one topic of discussion is how to TDD the Roman Numerals kata. Note: for regular readers, TDD is generally going to mean test driven development in this article. I suppose it could also stretch to include test driven design too. When instead I mean Continue reading "Roman Numerals"
You might have noticed, still no book. Sorry about that. It got shelved early in 2014 for a number of reasons. A bit of running out of steam after a year of writing for the magazine, a bit of creative differences , wanting to spend more time with my family, a bit of wanting to move Continue reading "I m not writing a book"