Programming intentionally random programs presents its own special software engineering considerations, in addition to the usual ones. I have been surprisingly slow to realize this, but two years in to working on a probabilistic programming platform I can recommend some specific habits around software engineering of intentionally random programs. Read more
On Intentionally Random Programs
For a little over two years, I have been professionally dealing with programs whose behavior is intentionally random. Why would one even have intentionally random programs? Read more
On Good Software
Good software is software that admits a simple mental model.
For all that I have observed and participated in plenty of discussions about one or another piece of software as to whether it is or is not good, I am surprised to say that I have never seen Read more
Best Effort vs Strictly Safe
Possibly the greatest tension in the design of programming languages occurs when encountering a user program that doesn’t quite make sense. The two coherent schools of thought on the subject are Read more
How to Compute with a Probability Distribution
What makes a good representation for computing with probability distributions? The two canonical options are samplers and probability density functions. Both are valuable; and the relationship between them turns out to hide two fruitful variations on the idea of a sampler, Read more
Social Function of Module Systems
Observing the state of modern software practice, one might notice that a rough tower of different abstraction mechanisms has emerged. One might then wonder: why do we need so many concepts, if their fundamental job is to give a name to some software, and allow one to use it just by referring to its name? Read more
Stochasticity is a Quantifier
In English, quantifiers are words like “all”, “one”, or “some” that indicate how broadly true the quantified clause is. Formal logic has adopted symbols for such words, namely “all”, “exactly one”, and “some” (in the sense of “at least one”). Probability theory offers us a reason to incorporate another symbol, Read more
Hard Work and Success
This essay is inspired by the assertion that hard work is more important for success than being smart. There are, of course, many meta-objections one could have against such an assertion, Read more
Testing Revisited
Consider the Cheeseburger
Advertising. People in my social circle are used to thinking of it as being an awful institution: greedy, faceless, unscrupulous corporations brainwashing the susceptible masses into wasting their hard-earned money on cheap, low quality, superfluous devices for solving problems no one actually has and that don’t even work. An irritation at best, sheer deceit and manipulation at worst. But in fact, what evils afflict the institution of advertising are reflections of its poor implementation, not of its superfluity. The reason advertising exists is Read more