Author Archives: Bill Wadge

The most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context. Jon Dewey What exactly is “intensional programming?” The easy answer is, programming in a language based on intensional logic. But that raises another, more important question, namely … Continue reading →

[This is the infamous section of the book Lucid the Dataflow Programming Language where I make fun of everyone working on imperative languages. It was very popular but many people hated it even though no individual is named. In a … Continue reading →

Sha la la la la la laLa la laLa di daLa di da Van Morrison (Brown Eyed Girl) A lot of people have to write as part of their jobs – grant proposals, progress reports, specifications. And there are endless … Continue reading →

I’m fortunate enough to have a mathematical concept named after me. And not just Wadge degrees. There’s also the Wadge hierarchy, Wadge reducibility, and the Wadge game. In fact I’ve seen people say they’re interested in “Wadge theory”. A whole … Continue reading →

I’ve already written about the origins of Lucid but that was a dry, technical, and incomplete post. Here is the real story, with all the drama and passion, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Well maybe not quite. … Continue reading →

Be ahead of your time, but only a little. – Mason Cooley Do you understand  monads? I don’t, so I  thought I’d explain them to you. Then, once you’ve got it, I’ll re-explain Lucid. No Haskell, optional category theory, gluten … Continue reading →

As part of the popshop project I designed and implemented a  concatenative (FORTH-like) language I called Popcode. It has lists (of commands), which among other things makes loops possible. The first concatenative language was Forth and nowadays the best known is … Continue reading →

A while back John Plaice and I invented an external module system for C . It worked pretty well for us but never caught on. Maybe it will be of some use to some of you. Sloth was part of … Continue reading →

Recently I revealed the secret of academic success. This was so popular (16000 views!) that I decided I would follow up with the secret of software success – success in producing software. Not that I’ve always been that successful – … Continue reading →

A while back Weichang Du and I designed a spreadsheet based on intensional logic, the  logic of values that vary over a coordinate space. Spreadsheets are a natural fit for ‘intensifying’ because a sheet is already a two-dimensional intension, varying … Continue reading →