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About Dogma & Ritual 
 I’m studying programming language and type theory outside my day job and family life, and since they say that trying to explain something is one of the best ways to learn it, I want to try to write about what I’m learning here. 
 The reason the site is called Dogma & Ritual is talked about at length in this post . 
 About the Author 
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Computer Science, mathematics, and magic 
 There’s a long-standing metaphor in computer science and programming literature that compares programming with magic. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) famously features a woodcut-style image on the cover, which has earned it the nickname the Wizard Book over the years. 
 
 
 
 
 Figure The famous cover…
With apologies to Lewis Carroll
 
 
 
 
 What the Tortoise said to Achilles 
 , Douglas Hofstadter 
 
 
 
 Douglas Hofstadter is the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach , a book which features many dialogues between Achilles, the Tortoise, and other characters, to illustrate the ideas in the book.
 , and Philip Wadler 
 
 
 
 Philip Wadler was…
If someone mentions “combinators”, you may first think about the Y-Combinator, most likely because of a certain startup incubator and the orange website associated with it. The Y combinator is neat, and honestly is the first thing that got me interested in combinators in general. But it’s also fairly impenetrable at a first glance, and even after staring at it for awhile,…
FizzBuzz is a common coding problem asked in technical screenings or interviews. It goes something like this: 
 
 Write a function to list the integers from 1 to 100, but for every multiple of 3, write “Fizz”, and for every multiple of 5, write “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both 3 and 5, it should write “FizzBuzz”; for every other number, it…
I currently live about 30 minutes east of Seattle in Washington state. There I work remotely for Cisco Systems on the Meraki dashboard, a large Ruby and Rails application. 
 I’m currently working on learning more about programming language theory and type theory. Current reads include Types and Programming Languages , The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages , and Programming in…