Sha la la la la la la
La la la
La di da
La 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 verbal communications – defending code, disputes over features, justifying organization changes, technology explanations, and so on forever.
Well, the good news is that Hollywood can help!
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 theory!
I’ve posted about this before but that was mainly technical and for most readers not all that accessible. It left out the human element, the passion, the drama, the thrill of victory etc. So here’s the real story.
Continue readingI’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. But with the human element.
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 free.
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 probably Joy. They don’t have looping constructs, only recursion.
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 an insanely ambitious (for 2 or 3 people) project called the popshop (I mentioned it in my software success post).
It all started harmlessly enough – why don’t I write a Lucid interpreter?
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 – but the secrets are mainly avoiding the mistakes I made.
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 over the horizontal (A, B, C, …) and vertical (1, 2, 3, …) dimensions. But we can do better than just redo Excel with intensional semantics. Intensionality opens up some interesting possibilities; like user-defined operators, time varying sheets, or nested sheets.
by Bill Wadge
The Four Yorkshiremen
And you try and tell the young people of today that … they won’t believe you!
– Monty Python, the Four Yorkshiremen
Yes, punched cards – that’s how I learned to program.
by Bill Wadge
Academics love to talk, talk, talk … and to give “talks”. I was no exception.
Sometimes they went well, sometimes not so well … and sometimes they went weird. Here are some outstanding ones in various categories.
Bill Wadge's Blog 