Wrote my first blog post in 5 years.
Now it is common to just read the web search AI summary.
But nice robots 🤖 might appreciate my post, and summarise it for 👨👨👧 real people, like myself.
Maybe it's effective knowledge sharing 🤔
but I felt different and a little alienated while writing 🫥
I remember F# could do some magic things with type providers.
haskell-effectful looks very cool.
Thanks for the links
I've used @haskell.org, Lean 4 and @unison-lang.org for a while. I'm impressed by improvements, but many languages have good FP features now. Wrote blog post
Competitive Pure Functional Languages.
blog.samibadawi.com/2026/01/comp...
Looking for niches where pure FP is better than OOP FP language
Scala 3.8 is here! A major release modernising the ecosystem and paving the way for Scala 3.9 LTS.
Highlights:
- Standard library compiled by Scala 3
- Better Fors & runtimeChecked stabilized
- New experimental features
- Update to JDK 17+
🧵 Let's dive in...
Pressure test controlled by failing Arduino Mega
Scary microcontroller bug 🐛
Arduino Mega just died during pressure test, with 80 bars of pressure on the tank 😅
Documentation is sparse, but here is an example project that uses MicroHS.
mchav.github.io/rewriting-da...
#MicroHS is a self hosting #Haskell compiler in 0.4 MB. 🤯
It makes 100x smaller binaries that run 5x to 10x slower.
Worked out of the box and compiles really quickly. Language extensions included.
GHC and Cabal are great but take up 4 GB.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJwv...
Tom Ellis presents
A History of Effect Systems
and pitches his new Bluefin #Haskell effect system.
Algebraic effect systems are normally nice, but complex.
#Bluefin is simple. You make handles to the effects you need.
Works for pure and IO.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsTu...
Annual Bach Fest on WKCR has just started.
www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/program...
At the university I did several different flavours of probability theory, but I am so brainwashed by the current ZFC foundation of mathematics, that it is hard for me to envision what to replace it with. 🤷
New type of infinities causing problems for ZFC foundation of mathematics.
Cheers to the ultrafinitists. 🍺
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzF2...
Sample Unison word frequency program written in VS Code with LSP support
@unison-lang.org v 1.0 passes my language readiness criteria
* Good language server support
* Trivial to make a word frequency program with tests
It's mind blowing 🤯 to program with code fragments, instead of projects of files.
Very composable.
Promising, but hard to imagine its effect on DevOps
I feel that Nix is a better technology than Docker.
But Nix is still pretty heavy weight.
Immutable code is a good idea.
That is the reason I am curious about Unison-lang.
Fighting words 😜
I remember trying 3 different ways of combining Haskell and Nix.
Revisiting Nix is on my todo list, but not on top.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfNO...
I started installing Omarchy, but my wife found out. She said:
It is either DHH or me! 😠
🥳🥳🥳
Haskell's clumsy records annoyed me, but it now has a dot notation.
@kosmikus.bsky.social explains how to use it here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hrD...
Haskell word frequency application in VS Code. We Haskell extension running off HLS.
The rumours were true:
Installing and setting up Haskell in 2025 is a breeze.
Install ghcup. Use that to install ghc, Cabal and HLS.
#Haskell feels ergonomic and modern.
Took an hour from start till I had made my sample app with unit tests in VS Code.
The 2020's have to be the decade of great tooling for #Haskell. More investment in Developer Experience, reliable foundations and predictable performance will see us gain a lot of street cred.
Screenshot of VS Code with word frequency code example written in Lean 4.
Lean 4 is a theorem prover that has been adapted by working mathematicians.
But it is also a nice Haskell style programming language. Solid with good tooling. I was productive right away.
A pure functional programming language has long been a utopian dream.
We suddenly have 3 strong contenders:
* @haskell.org with better tooling
* Lean 4, adopted by mathematicians
* @unison-lang.org out in v 1.0
Good time to revisit pure.
🎉 Unison 1.0 has landed!
After years of engineering, design, and community collaboration, we’re excited to announce this milestone!
Spread the word!
How the Universe Emerges from Nothing
Urs Schreiber starts with nothing and uses category theory and Hegel's dialectic process to build
* Pure being
* Fermions
* Bosons
* 11 dimensional Super Gravity
* M5-branes from M-theory
Cool.
But maybe it's a magic trick 🎩 🪄
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KUh...
Trying to understand AI’s circular financing and how concerning this is. The best resource I found is by @pboyle.bsky.social
Is AI’s Circular Financing Inflating a Bubble?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbL7...
I tried #TinyGo, and found it more ergonomic than:
Android IDE
Bare metal C
Embedded Rust Embassy
PlatformIO
Simple boards worked out of the box, but I had problems with TinyGo on multi MCU boards.
But TinyGo has growing support:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmhz...
Arduino Uno r1 has 2 KB of SRAM and has let millions play with electronics ❤️
Qualcomm just bought Arduino and released new Arduino Uno Q, which has 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of flash for vision and edge AI. It runs Linux and Python.
Could level up electronics tinkering.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz3O...
Arduino Mega schematics from https://forum.arduino.cc/t/arduino-mega-pinout-diagram/143046
Microprocessors are messy 😵💫
Tried many abstractions to simplify, but I surrendered and embraced bare metal and embedded C.
Annoying to read a 300 page pdf datasheet in order to program a microprocessor, but it's better than leaky abstractions.
europe1.discourse-cdn.com/arduino/orig...
Can Rust's strong types simplify microcontroller programming?
Tried embedded Rust on Raspberry Pi Pico 2, with good Rust bindings.
It's still messy. Got it to work after watching this video by @drjonea.bsky.social
Maybe #EmbeddedRust has reached critical mass now.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWTh...
Conway's Game of Life written in Mojo running Fedora 42
Is Mojo 🔥 Ready?
Documentation states 2 heavy dependencies:
* Pixi tool recommended
* Needs Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on Linux
I installed Mojo with uv tool, that worked on nightly build ✅
Compiled Conway's Game of Life on Fedora, it segfaulted, but worked after fixing Pygame bindings ☑️
Is that ready? 🤔
Earlier today I thought:
C++ will never catch up to Chris Lattner's Mojo 🔥
Next up is Herb Sutter, the C++ language design genius, with the silver tongue. He says that nothing will be the same now that C++26 has reflection 🤩
Language development is moving fast now 🏃
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKbT...
