Programs Split Over Multiple Files (featuring Troels Henriksen)
When thinking about how to create a language where little models can be combined into bigger more complex system models, Marianne struggles...
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Technology
Marianne Writes a Programming Language
Marianne Bellotti wants to understand how the people who design programming languages do what they do, so she's jumping right in and giving it a shot by writing her own language. Follow alon...
Episodes
13 episodesCode Generation (featuring Tikhon Jelvis)
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 a...
Uncertain Types part 2 (featuring Barak Michener and Eric Schles)
Still struggling to understand how to implement uncertain types, Marianne calls on two friends to sit down with her and brainstorm different...
Uncertain Types part 1 (featuring Maria Gorinova)
Equipped with new knowledge about type systems, Marianne begins speccing out plans to implement uncertain types and inject probabilistic pro...
Type Systems (featuring Ron Garcia)
Marianne completely underestimates the complexity of type systems and struggled to figure out how inference, checking and conversion work to...
Syntax Sugar (featuring James Houghton)
A few weeks of user testing has revealed specific problems with the syntax of Fault. Marianne ponders various approaches to solving those pr...
User Research for Programming Languages (featuring Michael Coblenz)
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 wi...
Exceptions Are Not Errors (featuring Smokey Jones)
Inevitably the best way to make design decisions is to practice implementation over and over again. Marianne experiments with writing differ...
From Parse Tree to Evaluator (featuring Sarah Withee)
A parser generator like ANTLR won't handle evaluating programs written in your new language. You need to write the code for that yourself. M...
Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)
Writing a programming language starts with its grammar. But what is a grammar in the context of computation? And how does one go about writi...
Certainty is a Programming Bug (featuring Hillel Wayne)
What kind of programming language is Marianne trying to write? Before we go any deeper into the guts of language design, Marianne and friend...
No One Just Designs a Programming Language (featuring Thorsten Ball)
Marianne ponders the consequences of different design decisions and how to direct her research through an enormous amount of information and...
Series Promo
Marianne is writing a programming language. This is probably a terrible idea, but those are always the best ;)