Interesting Links for November 2024

A special Programming Languages: Theory, Design and Implementation edition of some interesting articles I recently read on the internet:

• There is something amazing about making your own programming language. In “You Should Make a New Programming Language” 🏛️ Nicole Tietz-Sokolsaya puts forward some great reasons to do the same, but I do it just for the sheer excitement of witnessing a program written in my own language run.

• Why aren’t there programming languages that are convenient to write but slow by default, and allow the programmer to drop to a harder to write but more performant form, if required? Alex Kladov ponders on this question in “On Ousterhout’s Dichotomy” 🏛️, and offers a possible solution.

• I am big fan of Algebraic data types, and consider them an indispensable tool in the modern programmers’ toolbox. In “Where Does the Name ‘Algebraic Data Type’ Come From?” 🏛️ Li-yao Xia investigates the possible sources of the name, going back to the programming languages from half a century ago.

• Follow Casey Rodarmor through the rabbithole to learn where an unexpected newline character comes from in this entertaining and enlightening article “Whence ‘\n’?” 🏛️.

• Turnstyle 🏛️ is an esoteric, graphical functional language by Jasper Van der Jeugt. I have never seem anything like it before. It’s truly mind-blowing and I’m still trying to understand how it works.

• As good programmers, we try to stay away from the dark corners of programming languages, but Justine Tunney takes a head-first dive into them and comes up with an enthralling tale in the article “Weird Lexical Syntax” 🏛️.

• I am not going to lie, I love Lisps! I must have implemented at least a dozen of them by now. If you are like me, you may have wondered “Why Is It Easy to Implement a Lisp?” 🏛️. Eli Bendersky puts forward a compelling argument.

• How better to implement a fast (and small) Lisp than to compile it to LLVM IR. Using Clojure this time, John Jacobsen showcases it in “To The Metal… Compiling Your Own Language(s)” 🏛️.

• Phil Eaton takes an ingenious approach for “Compiling Dynamic Programming Languages” 🏛️, one that has never occurred to me before, but now will be a part of my toolbox forever.

• Here’s another technique that I was only vaguely familiar with: JIT compilation using macros. In “Runtime Optimization with Eval” 🏛️ Gary Verhaegen demonstrates this technique using Clojure.

• When compiling dynamically typed programming languages, we need to tag pointers to data with the runtime type information. In “What Is the Best Pointer Tagging Method?” 🏛️ Troy Hinckley describes some good ways of doing the same.

• I relish Max Bernstein’s articles about programming language implementation techniques. In “What’s in an e-graph?” 🏛️ they describe an optimization technique using e-graphs used in compilers.

• I love atypical uses of Programming Language Theory. Adam Dueck explains their PLT adventure in “How I Learned Pashto Grammar Through Programming Syntax Trees” 🏛️.

• Brainfuck, the most popular of esoteric programming languages, has been a lot on my mind recently. And who better to learn about compiling BF from than Wilfred Hughes. In “An Optimising BF Compiler” 🏛️ they go over the algorithms they used to write “An Industrial-Grade Brainfuck Compiler” 🏛️.

• And lastly, from the wicked mind of Srijan Paul, comes a twist: “Compiling to Brainf#ck” 🏛️ about their programming language Meep that, you guessed right, compiles to BF.

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