programming, language design, and human factors

Confession: I read the ACM Magazine. This makes me a dweeb even in programming circles. One of the things I found in it is “Metamorphic Testing”. I’ve never heard of it, and nobody I knew heard about it either. But the academic literature was shockingly impressive:…

Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser. We think it’s worthwhile to work on moving the ...

Wherein the author discusses (another) accident of history.

The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to...

It's easy to interpret any criticism of the hacker ethic—which is what I'm about to do—as a kind of assault.

Jonathan Blow of “The Witness” fame likes to talk about just typing the obvious code first. Usually it will turnout to be fast enough. If it doesn’t, you c...

I am not aiming at a general audience. I assume you have some notion of what security is and how it is provided (to the extent it is), in…

The source code of OpenBSD is great documentation of how to do things well.

This post describes a compile-time technique for catching use-after-move bugs in modern C++. It’s currently used to prevent some mistakes in the Serenity Operating System.

This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...

Okay, obviously many SQL queries do start with SELECT (and actually this post is only about SELECT queries, not INSERTs or anything).

Performance clearly matters to users. For example, the most common software update on the AppStore is "Bug fixes and performance enhancements." Now that Moore's Law has ended, programmers have to work hard to get high performance for their applications. But…

In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it