Tomas is a computer scientist, open-source developer and an occasional philosopher of science. I'm working on tools for data-driven storytelling, contribute to a number of F# projects and I run trainings and offer consulting via fsharpWorks.
The rule of three suggests that if you encounter the same pattern for the third time in your code, you should refactor it into a reusable abstraction. The same thing applies in programming language theory. When you find that you are doing the same thing for the third time, it is probably a good idea to stop and think - is there a general pattern? Figure 1. Auto-completion list showing possible…
Back in June, I was in Paris for the NewCrafts conference to talk about the growing opacity of software systems . This was fun, partly because NewCrafts is a fantastic conference (you can already get your tickets for 2024!) and also partly because my talk (arguing against many established "good engineering" practices) was in many ways arguing for the exact opposite than one of the keynotes,…
Architecture and urban planning have been a useful source of ideas for thinking about programming. I have written various blog posts and a paper Programming as Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning that argue why and explore some of those ideas. Like urban planning and architecture, the design of any interesting software system deals with complex problems that can rarely be analysed in full and…
Figure 1. The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander Many programmers know the name of the architect Christopher Alexander for his work on design patterns that has been adapted into the world of programming. A lot of people know of the, sometimes ridiculed, patterns like strategy (functions!) or visitor (pattern matching!) and some have read the Gang of Four design patterns book that…
Figure 1. Virtually eliminates your coding load. FLOW-MATIC promotional brochure (1957) No-code is a hot new topic for programming startups. The idea is to develop a system that allows end-users to do the programming they need without the difficult task of writing code. There are no-code systems for building mobile apps, analysing data and many more. It is perhaps not a surprise that "eliminating…
I started to learn how to program in high school at the end of the 1990s using a mix of BASIC, Turbo Pascal and HTML with JavaScript. The seed for this blog post comes from my experience with learning how to program in JavaScript, without having much guidance or organized resources. This article continues a theme that I started in my interactive Commodore 64 article , which is to look at past…
While the physicists investigate the nature of the mysterious portal that has recently appeared in North London, several human beings recently came through the portal, which appears to be a gate into an alternative universe. As we understood from the last two people coming through the portal, it seems to be a linked with a universe that is in many ways like ours, reached about the same level of…
In most discussions about how to make programming better, someone eventually says something along the lines of "we'll just have to wait until deep learning solves the problem!" I think this is a naively optimistic idea , but it raises one interesting question: In what sense are programs created using deep learning a different kind of programs than those written by hand? This question recently…
For a long time, I've been thinking about how to design a data visualization library that would make it easier to compose charts from simple components. On the one hand, there are charting libraries like Google Charts , which offer a long list of pre-defined charts. On the other hand, there are libraries like D3.js , which let you construct any data visualization, but in a very low-level way.…
Most real-world programming languages are too complex to be studied using formal methods. For this reason, academics often work with simple theoretical languages instead. The λ-calculus is a simple formal language that is often used for talking about functional languages, the π-calculus is a model of concurrent programming and there is an entire book, A Theory of Objects modelling various…
Despite having the term science in its name, it is not always clear what kind of discipline computer science actually is. Research on programming is sometimes like science, sometimes like mathematics, sometimes like engineering, sometimes like design and sometimes like art. It also has a long tradition of importing ideas from a wide range of other disciplines. In this article, I will look at ideas…
The number of Google search results for the phrase "choosing the first programming language" at the time of writing is 15,800. This illustrates just how debated the issue of choosing the first programming language is. In this blog post, I will not actually try to answer the question posed in the title of the post. I will not discuss what language we should teach as the first one. Instead, I will…
When I joined the School of Computing at the University of Kent , I was asked what subjects I wanted to teach. One of the topics I chose was Software Engineering . I spent quite a lot of time reading about the history of software engineering when working on my paper on programming errors and I go to a fair number of professional programming conferences , so I thought I can come up with a good way…
I've been teaching F# for over seven years now, both in the public F# FastTrack course that we run at SkillsMatter in London and in various custom trainings for private companies. Every time I teach the F# FastTrack course, I modify the material in one way or another. I wrote about some of this interesting history last year in an fsharpWorks article . The course now has a stable half-day…
In May, I joined the School of Computing at the University of Kent as a Lecturer (equivalent of Assistant Professor in some other countries). When applying for the job, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to best explain the kind of research that I would like to do. This blog post is a brief summary of my ideas. I'm interested in way too many things, including philosophy and design and data…
Unless you are a sci-fi author or some secret government agency, the question whether aliens would understand lambda calculus is probably not your main practical concern. However, the question is intriguing because it nicely vividly formulates a fundamental question about our formal mathematical knowledge. Are mathematical theories and results about them invented , i.e. constructed by humans, or…
The word "design" is often used when talking about programming languages. In fact, it even made it into the name of one of the most prestigious academic programming conferences, Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) . Yet, it is almost impossible to come across a paper about programming languages that uses design methods to study its subject. We intuitively feel that "design" is an…
Over the last year, I have been working on The Gamma project , which aims to make data-driven visualizations more trustworthy and to enable large number of people to build visualizations backed by data. The Gamma makes it possible to create visualizations that are built on trustworthy primary data sources such as the World Bank and you can provide your own data source by writing a REST service . A…
As someone who enjoys being at the intersection of the academic world and the world of industry, I'm very happy to see any attempts at bridging this harmful gap. For this reason, it is great to see that more people are interested in reading academic papers and that initiatives like Papers We Love are there to help. There is one caveat with academic papers though. It is very easy to see academic…
If you read a about the history of science, you will no doubt be astonished by some of the amazing theories that people used to believe. I recently finished reading The Invention of Science by David Wootton , which documents many of them (and is well worth reading, not just because of this!) For example, did you know that if you put garlic on a magnet, the magnet will stop working? Fortunately,…