Brendan Zab
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brendanzab.bsky.social
Brendan Zab
@brendanzab.bsky.social
200 followers 260 following 180 posts
Thinking about programming languages and imaginary landscapes. he/him

- https://types.pl/@brendan (preferred)
- https://github.com/brendanzab
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brendanzab.bsky.social
Ah, yes, from “The Implementation of LISP” www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/...
Another reason for the initial acceptance of awkwardnesses in the internal form of LISP is that we still expected to switch to writing programs as M-expressions. The project of defining M-expressions precisely and compiling them or at least translating them into S-expressions was neither finalized nor explicitly abandoned. It just receded into the indefinite future, and a new generation of programmers appeared who preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised.
August 16, 2025 at 7:04 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
Hah! Reminds me of the head and spine representation of function applications (i.e. where you want quick access to the thing you are applying arguments to). I could only track this down to “A Linear Spine Calculus” www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/papers/s...
Section 3.1 of the linked paper with the following highlighted: - “The spine calculus permits recovering both efficient head accesses and notational convenience” - “the spine S collects the sequence of destructors applied to it.”
August 13, 2025 at 12:03 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
Moss from this morning. Had to rescue some clumps that had been kicked up and flipped upside down!
A clump of dew-laden moss with grass, twigs and some leaves on top. It looks green and healthy. Various textures of moss with tiny droplets of dew beaded on it. Tufts of grass are sprouting through it. Rounded clumps of moss that look like rolling hills or clouds. You desperately want to pet it, but it's probably best to leave it be.
July 4, 2025 at 11:13 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
Got up early today to look at the moss!
A landscape of moss on the side of the path, with a beam of morning light highlighting it from behind.
June 21, 2025 at 11:42 PM
brendanzab.bsky.social
Some afternoon views from Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens, Dalesford last weekend.
Forested hills in the background lit up brilliantly in the afternoon light, framed in the by an old gate and some leafy trees. The scenic drive around the Wombat Hill Botanic gardens. A dusty road curves between an avenue of tall, leafy trees, with shafts of light beaming through the dust kicked up by a passing vehicle. The scenic drive around the Wombat Hill Botanic gardens, featuring an avenue of old trees. Shafts of light beam through the dust kicked up by a passing vehicle. The view over Dalesford from Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens. A hedge is in the foreground that frames houses on the hillside beyond. Multiple ridgelines follow afterwards into the haze, glowing in the afternoon light. A wisp of cloud traces through the sky above.
April 12, 2025 at 11:20 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
I greatly enjoy the spatial intuition for staging used in this paper, “An ML-Style Module System for Cross-Stage Type Abstraction in Multi-stage Programming” by Takashi Suwa and Atsushi Igarashi: doi.org/10.1007/978-.... More diagrams can be found in these slides: gfngfn.github.io/media/slides...
A screenshot of the top of page 238 of the linked paper, with a diagram showing the bracket and escape operators, and the how the cancel each other when combined. The bracket operator is represented as a raised, three-dimensional tile, and the escape operator is represented as a convex tile. When combined a smooth surface is formed as they cancel each other out.
February 25, 2025 at 3:11 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
One nifty thing that might interest you is that you can see the monad operations in the typing rules of some of these systems (thanks to David Ripley for pointing this out to me). For example here's return and bind from the previous paper:
Figure 6 from “An Introduction to Algebraic Effects and Handlers” by Matija Pretnar, showing the typing rules of a language using natural deduction notation. Return and bind are highlighted, with types that match the standard monad interface from functional programming languages.
February 17, 2025 at 11:34 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
Hello! I thought your language looked pretty interesting, but I noticed that the fonts don’t seem to be loading on the code examples, which makes them a bit hard to understand. Here's muratkasimov.art/Ya/Tutorials... in Firefox (it renders the same in Safari):
A screenshot of the linked page in Firefox, showing some errors in the JavaScript console.
December 17, 2024 at 8:03 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
Went on an adventure today and came back with this:
The cover of a zine that reads “Untitled Goose Game” A page in the zine with left page that reads: “I Am the Horrible Goose That Lives in the Town” with some goose sketches below. A screenshot of the goose terrorising a lady is on the right page, along with a passage of text written ostensibly by the goose (but actually by Daniel Lavery) about their exploits in the game. Concept art from Jake Strasser's sketchbook. More concept art from Jake Strasser's sketchbook.
October 16, 2024 at 10:45 AM
brendanzab.bsky.social
An island generator from the end of last year:
August 11, 2023 at 12:06 PM