iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

asyncio is the best thing about Python.

James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Hey John. That run_subprocess_with_callback depends only on python standard lib so you can copy the file into your project instead of depending on pyedifice. See comments in the source file.

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Graydon Hoare @graydon-pub.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Nicholas is one of the best engineers I've ever worked with and y'all should be racing to hire him if you can.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

It Would Be Good if the AI Bubble Burst by Stephen Diehl www.stephendiehl.com/posts/ai_bub...

stephendiehl.com

It Would Be Good if the AI Bubble Burst

Personal Blog

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! Jupyter adaptation now has a one-line zero-install shell command which works on any computer that has the #NixOS package manager: nix run github:IHaskell/learn-you-a-haskell-notebook For more information see github.com/IHaskell/lea...

github.com

GitHub - IHaskell/learn-you-a-haskell-notebook: Jupyter adaptation of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!

Jupyter adaptation of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - IHaskell/learn-you-a-haskell-notebook

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

For years I've been trying to convince people to use monadic parsers instead of regex for everything. hackage.haskell.org/package/repl... Your essay about bicameral syntax is the first time I've read a principled reason (other than speed) about why a regular parsing pass is a good idea.

hackage.haskell.org

replace-megaparsec

Find, replace, split string patterns with Megaparsec parsers (instead of regex)

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Rebecca Skinner @cercerilla.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

If you are curious about Haskell or wanting to start using functional programming to build real applications, this is a great chance to save some money on Effective Haskell and other great functional programming books.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

In the 2010s there were still a lot of programmers insisting that typechecking wasn't necessary but then TypeScript and Pyright were universally adopted and those people mostly shut up.

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Tikhon Jelvis @jelv.is · 24/11/2024

The SDLC is an awful model for how people program and an even worse model for how people *should* program—at best, it's a model for how people *imagine* programming. Unfortunately, it seems to be taught and taken as a fact in the industry :(

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

In 1997 Wadler and Jones published the Haskell language, so now in Haskell we can program do-this-thing-then-do-that-thing by using only IO Monad expressions, no statements. Happily, forever.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Wadler solved the problem of saying do-this-thing-then-do-that-thing using only expressions by adopting the Monad described by logician Eugenio Moggi. homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/paper...

homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Act III Climax and Resolution In 1987 the great computer scientists Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler decided that the good part of computer programming was the expressions, and the bad part was the statements.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Later, at IBM, Backus tried to create a language named Function Level which could say do-this-thing-then-do-that-thing using only expressions. IBM never published the Function Level language, and the source code was lost. worrydream.com/refs/Backus_...

worrydream.com

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

In his Turing Award lecture entitled Can Programming Be Liberated from the Von Neumann Style, he condemned his language, Fortran, and all other languages, as “fat and weak.” Backus warned the that languages with statements would “make their expressive weakness and their cancerous growth inevitable.”

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Act II Rising Action In 1977 the great computer scientist John Backus decided that the good part of computer programming was the expressions, and the bad part was the statements.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Landin abandoned his effort to rid programming of statements and joined the Gay Liberation Front. www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f...

cs.cmu.edu

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

In Landin’s paper The Next 700 Programming Languages, he invented the ISWIM language “biased towards expressions rather than statements,” but he failed to excise the statements. He failed because he couldn’t figure out how to say do-this-thing-then-do-that-thing in ISWIM by using only expressions.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

A Character-Driven Monad Tutorial with a Three-Act Structure Act I Inciting Incident In 1966, the great computer scientist Peter Landin decided that the good part of computer programming was the expressions, and the bad part was the statements.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

You wanted a banana but what you got was a banana in the computational context of a Gorilla Jungle monad transformer stack.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Just ordered Strange and Norrell for Christmas, thanks for making me aware.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

I was ALF's opponent and I lost. I blame my advisors, who told me to campaign on culture war stuff.

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Justin Garcia @purefunctor.me · 29/10/2024

Once upon a time I wrote about recursion c8998d8f.purefunctor.pages.dev/fear-not-rec...

c8998d8f.purefunctor.pages.dev

Fear Not Recursion

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

I searched for your name because I want to read your posts.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

At work I was asked how to avoid “copy-and-paste” across different GUI projects. My advice: copy-and-paste is good. “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/... “when structuring (Model-View-Update) apps, Do Not Plan Ahead.” guide.elm-lang.org/webapps/stru...

sandimetz.com

The Wrong Abstraction — Sandi Metz

I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction."  My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than th...

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 19/10/2024

Edifice is for the situation where you must use Python and you want a native desktop GUI.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

Edifice is like React, but with Python instead of JavaScript, and Qt Widgets instead of the HTML DOM. Edifice has function Components, Props, and Hooks just like React. The best way to put a native GUI on a useful Python library. github.com/pyedifice/py...

github.com

GitHub - pyedifice/pyedifice: Declarative GUI framework for Python and Qt

Declarative GUI framework for Python and Qt. Contribute to pyedifice/pyedifice development by creating an account on GitHub.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

Design patterns every programmer should learn in the 21st century: 1. Associativity 2. Currying 3. Sum types / Product types 4. Fold / Map 5. Passing functions as arguments 6. Immutable data structures

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Ma🌵🌵hew B WoOOOOoOOooOod | 🌎🚀🌙 @matthewbrendenwood.bsky.social · 23/09/2023

Hey bksy, I write books about science for middle and high school readers (and adults)! Got a fledgling human who's interested in the universe? Cloning dinosaurs? The space race? Chucking things? I've got you covered! Self-promotion is awkward so I'll disappear back into the bushes now...

The cover of my book, titled The Universe: The Big Bang, Black Holes, And Blue Whales, with text beneath spinning star trails over a mountain range.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 07/09/2023

“President Kennedy looked out to the world leaders and said; Fellow citizens of the world, let us take our stand, at this time, and in this place, to see if we can help move the world toward peace. And of course, he did. And then was killed a few weeks later.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLwu...

youtube.com

Jeffrey Sachs on President Kennedy’s Vision of Peace — How It Applies Today

Saturday June 10, 2023 is the 60th Anniversary of President Kennedy’s American University speech on world peace.The JFK Peace Speech Committee is sponsoring ...

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 06/09/2023

“This talk opened up connections for me. It both taught me more than any talk I’ve consumed for the past year and confirmed the many monadic functionality that I naively thought I invented” — demesisx in the comments www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLkb...

youtube.com

Monadic Parsers at the Input Boundary

When reading a byte stream over the process I/O boundary, the first thing which everyone should do is to parse the byte stream with a monadic parser.The talk...

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 06/09/2023

obtention: “the action of obtaining something.” Yeah good one.

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James Dawson Brock @jamesbrock.bsky.social · 06/09/2023

I saw Douglass Adams speak before he died, I guess it was about the year 1994. He was not funny at all, and instead warned us of environmental collapse. We of course were disappointed and inattentive.

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