Why separate compilation is a good thing

I was talking with a friend about why I hate C++ (it’s actually a complicated tolerate/hate relationship), and mentioned that templates don’t have separate compilation. “That’s not really a big deal”, my friend replied. I remember a time when I thought the same thing. So what if I have to recompile some [...]

What’s a natural transformation?

For some reason I’ve had a great amount of trouble learning category theory. I think a lot of that is that most of the literature sucks. But I don’t blame it, in fact I find it encouraging, because it indicates that there is a brain-rewiring involved: people who know category theory cannot teach [...]

Music Gear Review

Over the past couple years, I have accumulated many thousands of dollars of musical equipment. I thought I would take some time to review the pros and cons of what I’ve purchased for future imitators :-). You can hear this gear in action in all the SNW recordings.

Main keyboard: Nord Stage 76
I [...]

C’est la vie

A comment arrived a few minutes ago asking for details of the life flux I mentioned in passing here. I was messing with my blog and had to restore from backup, so I lost the original comment. Sorry, whoever you were.
Back in December a message arrived on haskell-cafe announcing a Haskell job opportunity [...]

Blog Upgrade

I just gave WordPress a much-needed upgrade, from version 1.3 to the latest version 2.5. I have to say, WordPress 2.5 is a very nice piece of software. I was extremely pleased by the upgrade process, which painlessly preserved my archives all the way back to 2003, even from such an old version. [...]

Symphonic Poem no. 1

I just finished, in some sense, the first of a series (hopefully) of symphonic poems. I took a long break in the middle of writing this, so I could be mistaken, but I think it took about 20 hours total. It still needs a little tweaking; in particular some of the harmonies on [...]

SNW Backlogging

SNW is dead :-(. But I still have some recordings lying around that I’m gradually editing. Here’s the first batch, from March 20:

01
02 – a minimalist (in the classical sense) exercise
03
04 – fun and funky
05 – a long piece with many sections, pretty upbeat

#01 and #03 are included for completeness; they suck [...]

Stop Using Undecidable Instances

I’d say a good 5% of the threads on the haskell-cafe mailing list have something to do with the typechecker doing strange unexpected things. And the test code for 100% of these features one of the two lines:

{-# LANGUAGE UndecidableInstances #-}
{-# -fallow-undecidable-instances #-}

There was one today asking why the typechecker was getting into an [...]

Git Revolution

I’ve been learning about git, and have generally been excited about the distributed model. I mean, I used svk, but a robust distributed model is quite exciting. Tonight I had a completely crazy idea: to make a game around git.
I brainstormed and I brainstormed, many brains rained. And then it hit me: [...]