Category Archives: projects

Subtracting natural numbers: types and usability

Posted on February 7, 2023 by Brent

For several years now I have been working on a functional teaching language for discrete mathematics, called Disco. It has a strong static type system, subtyping, equirecursive algebraic types, built-in property-based testing, and mathematically-inspired syntax. If you want to know … Continue reading →

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Swarm virtual hackathon

Posted on December 12, 2022 by Brent

This Wednesday, December 14, we will have the first (annual? monthly? probably somewhere in between…) Swarm swarm, i.e. collaborative virtual hackathon. Details can be found here on the Swarm wiki. Time: 8am-5pm CST / 9am-6pm EST / 2pm-11pm UTC (feel … Continue reading →

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Swarm alpha release!

Posted on October 6, 2022 by Brent

The Swarm development team is very proud to announce the very first alpha release of the game. There are still many missing features (for example, saving games is not yet possible) and known bugs, but at this point it’s quite … Continue reading →

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Types for top-level definitions

Posted on August 27, 2022 by Brent

I’ve come up with idea for a type system for first-class (global) definitions, which can serve as a very lightweight alternative to a proper module system. I’m posting it here in the hopes of getting some feedback and pointers to … Continue reading →

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Swarm: status report

Posted on June 20, 2022 by Brent

Swarm is a 2D programming and resource gathering game, written in Haskell. I announced it last September and gave an update one week after that, but haven’t written anything since then. However, that doesn’t mean development has stopped! Since last … Continue reading →

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Swarm: a lot can happen in a week

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Brent

It’s been about a week since I put out an announcement and call for collaboration on a new game, Swarm. Since then, the response has been fantastic: lots of people have tried it out, a few have even streamed themselves … Continue reading →

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Swarm: preview and call for collaboration

Posted on September 23, 2021 by Brent

For about a month now I have been working on building a game1, tentatively titled Swarm. It’s nowhere near finished, but it has at least reached a point where I’m not embarrassed to show it off. I would love to … Continue reading →

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Types versus sets in math and programming languages

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Brent

For several years I have been designing and implementing a functional teaching language especially for use in the context of a Discrete Mathematics course. The idea is for students to be exposed to some functional and statically-typed programming early in … Continue reading →

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Lightweight invertible enumerations in Haskell

Posted on July 5, 2019 by Brent

In a previous post I introduced a new Haskell library for enumerations (now on Hackage as simple-enumeration). The Data.Enumeration module defines a type Enumeration a, represented simply by a function Integer -> a which picks out the value of type … Continue reading →

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Lightweight, efficiently sampleable enumerations in Haskell

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Brent

For another project I’m working on, I needed a way to enumerate and randomly sample values from various potentially infinite collections. There are plenty of packages in this space, but none of them quite fit my needs: universe (and related … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, haskell, projects | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments