When thinking about how to create a language where little models can be combined into bigger more complex system models, Marianne struggles to understand why not to take the completely straight forward approach of importing files. While searchi

Code Generation (featuring Tikhon Jelvis)

Apr 7th, 2021 30m 4s

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 proofs. Full of enthusiasm she invites the software engineer who gave that talk, Tikhon Jelvis, to ela

Uncertain Types part 2 (featuring Barak Michener and Eric Schles)

Mar 31st, 2021 27m 31s

Still struggling to understand how to implement uncertain types, Marianne calls on two friends to sit down with her and brainstorm different approaches. It looks more and more like adding uncertainty will cause the language to scale to impracti

Uncertain Types part 1 (featuring Maria Gorinova)

Mar 24th, 2021 24m 3s

Equipped with new knowledge about type systems, Marianne begins speccing out plans to implement uncertain types and inject probabilistic programming into Fault models. She picks the brain of Maria Gorinova—researcher and probabilistic programmi

Type Systems (featuring Ron Garcia)

Mar 17th, 2021 24m 28s

Marianne completely underestimates the complexity of type systems and struggled to figure out how inference, checking and conversion work together. After a month of scraping together a smattering of facts, she calls on expert Ron Garcia to help

Syntax Sugar (featuring James Houghton)

Mar 10th, 2021 28m 44s

A few weeks of user testing has revealed specific problems with the syntax of Fault. Marianne ponders various approaches to solving those problems and talks to James Houghton about the intersection between programming and system dynamic modelin

User Research for Programming Languages (featuring Michael Coblenz)

Dec 23rd, 2020 24m 12s

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 users and see whether it has the right features and syntax. To do this she talks with programmin

Exceptions Are Not Errors (featuring Smokey Jones)

Dec 16th, 2020 23m 39s

Inevitably the best way to make design decisions is to practice implementation over and over again. Marianne experiments with writing different types of specs and considers various ways they could be executed under the hood. Midway through she

From Parse Tree to Evaluator (featuring Sarah Withee)

Dec 9th, 2020 25m 48s

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 explains how to build an AST from a parse tree, create an evaluation loop, and how esolangs (eso

Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)

Dec 2nd, 2020 27m 51s

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? This week Marianne talks with computational linguist Jeff Heinz about Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky

Certainty is a Programming Bug (featuring Hillel Wayne)

Nov 25th, 2020 19m 52s

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 Wayne debate the shortcomings of various approaches to specifying and modeling program behavior.

No One Just Designs a Programming Language (featuring Thorsten Ball)

Nov 18th, 2020 26m 46s

Marianne ponders the consequences of different design decisions and how to direct her research through an enormous amount of information and choices. Thorsten Ball, author of Writing a Compiler in Go, talks about his experiences designing Monke