Author Archives: Brent

Diagrams 1.0

Posted on January 17, 2014

The diagrams team is very pleased to announce the 1.0 release of diagrams, a framework and embedded domain-specific language for declarative drawing in Haskell. Check out the gallery for some examples of what it can do. Diagrams can be used … Continue reading →

Posted in diagrams, haskell, projects | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Catsters guide

Posted on January 14, 2014

tl;dr: http://byorgey.wordpress.com/catsters-guide-2/ In an attempt to solidify and extend my knowledge of category theory, I have been working my way through the excellent series of category theory lectures posted on Youtube by Eugenia Cheng and Simon Willerton, aka the Catsters. … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, math, teaching | Tagged | 1 Comment

In defense of drawing by coding

Posted on October 18, 2013

Just some half-baked thoughts in repsonse to Bret Victor’s talk, Drawing Dynamic Visualizations (along with his addendum here). As usual, it is a fun and inspiring talk, so if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it; but I will … Continue reading →

Posted in diagrams | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Come visit the FARM!

Posted on August 10, 2013

Registration is now open for the first (!) ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling and Design (FARM), to be held in Boston on September 28 (the day after ICFP). I’m really excited—it’s shaping up to be a really … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell | Leave a comment

FARM 2013: call for demonstration proposals

Posted on July 8, 2013

Do you enjoy writing beautiful code to produce beautiful artifacts? Have something cool to show off at the intersection of functional programming and visual art, music, sound, modeling, visualization, or design? The deadline for submitting a paper has passed, but … Continue reading →

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling and Design

Posted on May 13, 2013

I’m helping organize a new workshop, FARM, to be held in Boston this September (right after ICFP). Many readers of this blog may have already seen the announcement, but I thought it worth saying a bit more about it here, … Continue reading →

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Monad transformers: a cautionary tale

Posted on April 29, 2013

When writing the code in my previous post, I wanted to have a monad which combined the ability to generate random numbers with the ability to fail. Naturally, I decided to use RandT Maybe. But when I tried to write … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Random binary trees with a size-limited critical Boltzmann sampler

Posted on April 25, 2013

Today I’d like to talk about generating random trees. First, some imports and such (this post is literate Haskell). > {-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-} > > module BoltzmannTrees where > > import Control.Applicative > import Control.Arrow ((&&&)) > import Control.Lens … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, haskell, math, species | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Beeminding for fun and profit

Posted on April 16, 2013

I’ve been using Beeminder (which I’ve mentioned once before) for a little over six months now. The verdict? Beeminder has changed my life. That sounds dramatic, but I’m not kidding. I am far more productive than I’ve ever been. I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in grad school, meta | Tagged , , , | 16 Comments

Introducing diagrams-haddock

Posted on March 23, 2013

I am quite pleased to announce the release of diagrams-haddock, a tool enabling you to easily include programmatically generated diagrams in your Haddock documentation. Why might you want to do this? “A picture is worth a thousand words”—in many instances … Continue reading →

Posted in diagrams, haskell, writing | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments