Category Archives: Uncategorized

Power concedes nothing without a demand. -Frederick Douglass When the late Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we had no idea what we were getting in for.

When Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we intended it be a general purpose language like Pascal (very popular at the time.) Pascal had while loops and we managed to do iteration with equations. However in Pascal you can nest … Continue reading →

Recently there was a post on the HN front page pointing to a GitHub repository containing an old (2019) version of the source for PyLucid (I don’t know who posted it). It generated a lot of interest in Lucid but … Continue reading →

I recently graduated my 17th and last PhD student, Monem Shennat. This is the abstract of his dissertation with my annotations (the abstract of a University of Victoria dissertation is limited to 500 words). The problem he tackled was that of … Continue reading →

I have some theories about these modes – for example, cropping one into the other. I tried them out on the Monna Lisa and … read on!

Recently my PhD student gave a rehearsal of their 20 minute oral presentation. It was ok. Average. In other words, (seemingly) long, and boring. Like so many people’s technical talks. What can you do? What you can do is follow … Continue reading →

Two cheers for the World Wide Web — Ted Nelson Ted Nelson invented hypertext but not the web. He thinks it hasn’t fulfilled its real potential, and I agree. One of his good ideas that the web doesn’t really support … Continue reading →

As I’ve said before, PyFL is functional programming for the rest of us. (It’s available at pyflang.com.) PyFL now has type checking – without type declarations. Instead the type is produced by evaluating the program over the domain of types.

Readers of this blog are familiar with notions of computability – basically, the question is, what can machines do without human assistance? And you are familiar with machines. Electronic ones of course, but I always like to think of machines … Continue reading →

When Lucid first came out decades ago it was a very primitive language. It had only program variables and built-in operators and functions, like next or fby. Users could not define their own functions (or “subroutines” as they were often … Continue reading →