Marianne Writes a Programming Language
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Programs Split Over Multiple Files (featuring Troels Henriksen)
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When thinking about how to create a language where little models can be combined into bigger more complex system models, Marianne struggles to underst...
Code Generation (featuring Tikhon Jelvis)
07 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Part of Marianne’s flash of inspiration came from a talk she’d seen about translating programs to a form Z3, a popular SMT solver, can run as proo...
Uncertain Types part 2 (featuring Barak Michener and Eric Schles)
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Still struggling to understand how to implement uncertain types, Marianne calls on two friends to sit down with her and brainstorm different approache...
Uncertain Types part 1 (featuring Maria Gorinova)
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Equipped with new knowledge about type systems, Marianne begins speccing out plans to implement uncertain types and inject probabilistic programming i...
Type Systems (featuring Ron Garcia)
17 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Marianne completely underestimates the complexity of type systems and struggled to figure out how inference, checking and conversion work together. Af...
Syntax Sugar (featuring James Houghton)
10 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A few weeks of user testing has revealed specific problems with the syntax of Fault. Marianne ponders various approaches to solving those problems and...
User Research for Programming Languages (featuring Michael Coblenz)
23 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Marianne has a working prototype of Fault, but still no idea if anyone will understand the design or find it useful. She needs to test it with some us...
Exceptions Are Not Errors (featuring Smokey Jones)
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Inevitably the best way to make design decisions is to practice implementation over and over again. Marianne experiments with writing different types ...
From Parse Tree to Evaluator (featuring Sarah Withee)
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A parser generator like ANTLR won't handle evaluating programs written in your new language. You need to write the code for that yourself. Marianne ex...
Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Writing a programming language starts with its grammar. But what is a grammar in the context of computation? And how does one go about writing one? Th...
Certainty is a Programming Bug (featuring Hillel Wayne)
25 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What kind of programming language is Marianne trying to write? Before we go any deeper into the guts of language design, Marianne and friend Hillel Wa...
No One Just Designs a Programming Language (featuring Thorsten Ball)
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Marianne ponders the consequences of different design decisions and how to direct her research through an enormous amount of information and choices. ...
Series Promo
27 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Marianne is writing a programming language. This is probably a terrible idea, but those are always the best ;)