Emphasizing Specialization

I have briefly—or perhaps not so briefly, my interests being unpredictable beasts—shifted the focus of my research to lazy specialization. This topic was discussed extensively, but not comprehensively, in Michael Jonathan Thyer’s dissertation, Lazy Specialization, and seems to have received little attention otherwise. This is unfortunate. I consider it a very important [...]

My Premonition

Last summer I got the opportunity to work briefly with Conal Elliott in Belgium. The two weeks I spent there are still making an impact on me; immediately I resonated with his semantic design idea. But the more important ideas were the ones I picked up subconsciously, and I’m just now becoming able [...]

Might as well face it, I’m addicted to logic

I’m trying really hard not to become a logician. Like my obsession with FRP, it would be very interesting and educational. But my FRP fancy came from a desire to make games more easily, and I have since lost interest in that endeavor, studying FRP for its own sake. Now I am [...]

Existential Memoization

FRP has this essential trade-off of computation vs. garbage collection. I can come up with implementations which are lazy in their computation, but never forget anything; and I can come up with implementations which forget but are too eager in their implementation (in which garbage collection has too much effect on runtime performance, because [...]

The Third Virtue

Ever since working with the Anygma team, the idea of a purely functional operating system has been stirring in my head: An operating system that stays denotational and composable all the way down to the device drivers. In this world, we have to make no sacrifices like IO to interface with the impure [...]

Ha! I can’t even get Events right

No wonder FRP has been so difficult. In going back to basics, forgetting about behaviors and just doing Events, I realize that my belief that Events are “the easy part” has been flawed. Neither of the semantics I’ve had in mind are both implementable and appropriate. Or rather, they both are, but [...]

Ridding ourselves of IO before there is a good replacement

I have been researching FRP for about a year now without finding or discovering an implementation I like. I don’t know if there is one — maybe my standards are just too high. However, it has initiated me into the more general interest of purely functional foundations.
Since I am tired of [...]

Continuous Stream Fusion

I’ve been able to sketch-implement a version of FRP with a strange distinction: Env vs. Behavior. I’ll give you the intuition, then the rest of the article will develop the semantics more fully. I thought “backwards” to discover this (the word “discover” used under the assumption that it has some merit: questionable), [...]

Reactive spaces

My recent days have been spent staring at the ceiling, drawing abstract doodles on a whiteboard, or closing my eyes and watching higher-dimensional images fly through my consciousness. No, I haven’t been on drugs. I’m after a very specific piece of mathematics, to solve a specific problem. But I have no idea [...]

Relative time FRP

Conal seems to have discovered an essential change in the semantics of FRP. The change is to think in terms of relative time instead of absolute time (Einstein would approve). It really cleans a lot of things in the semantics up, makes the implementation local (which functional programming is very good at making [...]