Recent
essays
- New Yorker Cartoon, c. 2025
- Cryptographic techniques used by nCrypt Light in 1994
- Mutual Recursion in Language
- The Inner Osborne Effect Thanks for posting this, great stuff...—Mark Watson
- Wow! Thank you so much for taking the time to write Remembering John Conway's FRACTRAN, a ridiculous, yet surprisingly deep language and for sharing it :) Will have to read a few more times before it properly sinks in I think! Really thorough and well written!
2015 - 2019
books
JavaScript Allongé (pdf, podcast) is as close to capturing the true soul of JavaScript as anything I’ve read. The examples are very well thought out, and the writing style is a joy to read.—acjohnson55
- This book is awesome and blowing my mind in a great way.”—Johnathan Mukai
- The best discussion of functional programming in js I’ve found so far.—Nicholas Faiz
- I think it’s one of the best tech books I’ve read since Sedgewick’s Algorithms in C.—Andrey Sidorov
talks
- Optimism and the Growth Mindset from NDC Conferences
- Optimism II from DevDay
- Optimism from Nordic Ruby
- JavaScript Combinators from DevDay
- JavaScript Combinators, The Six Edition from NDC Conferences
- First-Class Commands: An unexpectedly fertile design pattern from NDC Conferences
essays
- Exploring Regular Expressions, Part II: Regular Languages and Finite-State Automata
- Exploring Regular Expressions and Finite-State Recognizers, Part I
- A Brutal Look at Balanced Parentheses, Computing Machines, and Pushdown Automata is amazingly well written. You covered a good deal of any introduction to computational theory course in a straightforward, well motivated matter. This is definitely something I’ll be passing around to some of my bootcamp friends who are curious taste some of the theory they don’t get exposure to.—kjeetgil
- Ayoayo and Linear Recursion
- Structural Sharing and Copy-on-Write Semantics, Part II: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle
- Exploring Structural Sharing and Copy-on-Write Semantics, Part I
- Alice and Bobbie and Sharleen and Dyck
- Pattern Matching and Recursion
- Ruby's Hashes and Perl's Autovivification, in JavaScript
- Why Y? Deriving the Y Combinator in JavaScript sounds like poetry. Beautifully written!—nikodunk
- To Grok a Mockingbird
- The Eight Queens Problem... and Raganwald's Unexpected Nostalgia
- A Trick of the Tail
- Recursion? We don't need no stinking recursion!
- More State Machine ❤️: From Reflection to Statecharts
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ❤️ the State Machine I’ve been looking for a resource to introduce state machines to others. This does much more. Thank you—Pyrolistical
- Truncatable Primes in JavaScript
- Closing Iterables is a Leaky Abstraction
- A Sequence Problem
- What's a Transducer?
- Having our cake and eating it too: "Using iterators to write highly composeable code"
- foldl, foldr, and associative order
- Turing Machines and Tooling, Part I
- The Lumberjane Song
- Time, Space, and Life As We Know It
- I really enjoyed Why Recursive Data Structures? because it introduced me to a new data structure and some very elegant and (subjectively) beautiful algorithms.—johnfn
- From Higher-Order Functions to Libraries And Frameworks
- Anamorphisms in JavaScript
- From Mixins to Object Composition
- Why Are Mixins Considered Harmful?
- The Hubris of Impatient Sieves of Eratosthenes
- “We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris”
- “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute”
- First-Class Commands (the annotated presentation)
- This is not an essay about 'Traits in Javascript' (updated)
- JavaScript Mixins, Subclass Factories, and Method Advice
- super() considered hmmm-ful
- An ES6 function to compute the nth Fibonacci number
- Solving a Coding Problem with Iterators and Generators
- Getters, Setters, and Organizing Responsibility in JavaScript
- Extension Methods, Monkey-Patching, and the Bind Operator
- Method Advice in Modern JavaScript
- Method Decorators in ECMAScript 2015 (and beyond)
- Using ES.later Decorators as Mixins
- Purely Functional Composition
- Functional Mixins in ECMAScript 2015
- Prototypes are Objects (and why that matters)
- Classes are Expressions (and why that matters)
- De Stijl: How necessary are var, let, and const?
- OOP, JavaScript, and so-called Classes
- Carnac the Magnificent
- Hilbert's Grand JavaScript School (2015 Edition)
- Left-Variadic Functions in JavaScript
- Partial Application in ECMAScript 2015
- The Symmetry of JavaScript Functions (revised)
- (unlikely to be) The Last Word on Interviewing for a JavaScript Job
- Interviewing for a JavaScript Job
- Lazy Iterables in JavaScript
- The Quantum Electrodynamics of Functional JavaScript
- Tail Calls, Default Arguments, and Excessive Recycling in ES-6
- Destructuring and Recursion in ES-6
2010 - 2014
code
- HashLife in the Browser, computing qudrillions of generations of Conway’s Game of Life in a browser.
- allong.es, a library for writing ES5 in a functional style.
- oscin.es, a library for playing with combinatorial logic puzzles such as those found in To Mock a Mockingbird
books
- JavaScript Allongé (ES5) (podcast)
- CoffeeScript Ristretto (pdf)
- Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity
talks
- The Art of the JavaScript Metaobject Protocol: Duck Typing, Compatibility, and the Adaptor Pattern from Nordic JS.
- Javascript Combinators from NDC Conferences
- The Art of the Javascript Metaobject Protocol from NDC Conferences
- Invent the future, don’t recreate the past from Future JS
- The Not-So-Big Software Design from wroc_love.rb.
- I have a good feeling about this - Why tooling is poised to make the jump to hyperspace from Web Rebels
- The Rebellion Imperative from Øredev
essays
- Why Why Functional Programming Matters Matters
- Fun with Named Functions in JavaScript
- 600 Months
- Chickens And Pigs
- I Can't Find Good Salespeople
- A JavaScript Constructor Problem, and Three Solutions
- Greenspunning Predicate and Multiple Dispatch in JavaScript
- Structs and ImmutableStructs
- Repost: Captain Obvious on JavaScript
- How to Trick the Gullible into Learning a New Programming Language
- JavaScript Values Algebra
- Mixins, Forwarding, and Delegation in JavaScript
- Class Hierarchies? Don't Do That!
- Future JS
- Writing OOP using OOP
- A Programmer's Story
- At home with the Bumblethwaites
- Private Methods In Ruby
- Prototypes Are Not Classes
- The New JavaScript Problem
- Type-Fu Fighting
- Defactoring
- The Predicate Module Pattern
- Leaky Greenspunned Abstractions
- I hated, hated, hated this CoffeeScript
- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Scoping in CoffeeScript and JavaScript
- Yes, JavaScript is a Lisp
- Unfinished Work #1: Bind-by-Contract
- Happy Birthday To Me
- Functional's Greatest Accomplishment
- Inelegance
- config ||= config
- Did you ever take that test yourself?
- When FP? And when OOP?
- Explicit vs. Clever
- High Level Trampolining
- Trampolines in JavaScript
- My Literate CoffeeScript Blogging Workflow
- The Interview
- Zee Hackenbush Bird
- Arity and Partial Function Application
- Six Questions
- Counting Crows (diversion)
- A Surreal Encounter with a Winged Elephant
- A long time ago, in a village far, far away
- What's the difference between Currying and Partial Application?
- Two Brief Points About CoffeeScript 1.5
- Implementing the Sieve of Eratosthenes with Functional Programming
- Hilbert's School Closed for Discriminatory Practices
- Hilbert's Grand JavaScript School
- Twenty Thirteen
- Solving the "Drunken Walk" problem with iterators
- The "Drunken Walk" Programming Problem
- Tortoises, Teleporting Turtles, and Iterators (CoffeeScript)
- Tortoises, Teleporting Turtles, and Iterators (JavaScript)
- Classes vs. Prototypes in JavaScript
- Practical Applications of Partial Application
- Effective JavaScript Reviewed
- Function and Method Decorators
- The Madness of King JavaScript
- More than you ever wanted to know about "this" in JavaScript, Part I
- More Combinator Recipes in JavaScript: Partial, Bound, Send and Fluent
- Combinator Recipes for Working With Objects in JavaScript
- Duck Programming While one of the main points of the article seems to be "duck programming is bad because it circumvents proper workflows", I suspect you could also reverse it and say "people write duck programs to avoid terrible workflows"—overgard
- Williams, Master of the COMEFROM
- Software's Receding Hairline
- OOP practiced backwards is "POO"
Selected early works
code
- andand, the Maybe monad in idiomatic Ruby
- JQuery Combinators, composition-oriented tooling based on combinatory logic
- You Are ‘Da Chef, aspect-oriented programming tooling for Underscore projects
- rewrite_rails, add syntactic abstractions like
andandand String-to-Block to Rails projects without monkey-patching - ick, an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Monads, written in ES5
- String#to_proc, a port of the String Lambdas from Oliver Steele’s Functional Javascript library
- nCrypt Light, “strong” encryption for the origial Apple Newton in 1994
books
talks
- Beautiful Failure from CUSEC
- Bullshit from Unspace Interactive
essays
- Elegance and the Surreals
- A program to compute the nth Fibonacci number
- The Mouse Trap A+ story. Can't believe how much this stuff happens.—Xichekolas
- Billy Martin's Management Secret, a Play in Three Acts
- We Have Lost Control Of The Apparatus
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