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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