Nano-Blog : March 30, 2025

Nano-Blog for the week of March 30, 2025.

§ April 4, 2025

Concerning David Gries' "The Science of Programming"

The difference between reason and intuition is a topic of recent interest. Consider the popularity of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Over thet last fifty years, the software development has followed both threads. When we talk about "code smells," we are appealing to our intuition. When we talk about formal methods and algorithm analysis, we are considering the rational, rigorous aspect of programming.

The latter is where David Gries' 1981 classic The Science of Programming focuses. Gries takes us through the rigorous process of constructing software based on practical mathematics. You may not need to have a deep foundation in math to become a software engineer, but to be good at it, you should develop your math chops. This text is an accessible introduction to the type of rigor which will eventually prove vital to your life as a developer. [ Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Eric for pointing this one out. ]

#books #programming #software-eng
Installing the Newsboat RSS Feed Reader

Having entered the 21st century, the Bit-Roastery is now making videos. Our first video short is a demonstration of the ease with which one may install newsboat, a text oriented RSS feed reader for Unix-like systems.

#newsboat #RSS #video

About the Jupiter Ace

Speaking of FORTH, we are reminded of the Jupiter Ace, a ZX80 clone from the early 1980s that ran FORTH as it's default programming language instead of BASIC. The Jupiter Ace came with the book FORTH Programming by Steven Vickers. Vickers' book is at least as good an introduction to FORTH as the standard intro, Starting Forth by Leo Brodie.

#books #forth #Jupiter-Ace #programming #retrocomputing
What do you get when you mix FORTH with a Web Browser?

Q: What do you get when you mix the FORTH Programming Language with a web browser? A: WAForth, a FORTH environment that targets WebAssembly.

Hackaday covered WAForth with the article Web Pages Via FORTH back in 2018. And Remko Tronçon mentioned it in the blog article A Dynamic Forth Compiler for WebAssembly. Though slightly dated, both are good starting points for understanding what WAForth is. The CollapseOS article Why Forth? lays out a decent argument for why you might want to use FORTH. But most of all... FORTH is kind of fun.

#CollapseOS #forth #programming #WAForth #wasm

If You're Looking for a Book on Category Theory

If you're looking for a book on Category Theory, we can recommend this one: Category Theory by Steve Awodey.

#books #functional #programming #category-theory
A Simple Explanation of Monads

If you ask a seasoned functional programmer "What is a monad?" you may get a horrible answer back: "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors." The answer isn't incorrect, but it's horrible if you're a beginner. There's got to be an easier way to explain monads so people just starting out with functional programming.

This video from the Studying with Alex YouTube channel explains Monads without reverting to jargon. A good grounding in Functional Programming and parts of Category Theory will help you reason about functional programming, but you don't have to be an expert to understand the concepts.

#category-theory #functional #programming #video
Rebooting the nano-blog

Rebooting the nano-blog and including a few legacy entries from Meadhbh Hamrick's Nano-Blag. The Nano-Blog is sort of a cross between a micro-blogging service like Mastadon or Bluesky and an RSS feed.

Unlike a normal blog, the Nano-Blog is home for tiny scraps of content. Unlike social media micro-blogs (BlueSky, Threads, Mastadon, &c), content stays on our site. You're free to syndicate the content, following the site license. We've even included an RSS Feed to make it easy.

#nano