Category Archives: writing

What’s the Difference? video and slides

Posted on October 20, 2018 by Brent

At ICFP in St. Louis I presented my paper with Kenny Foner, What’s the Difference? A Functional Pearl on Subtracting Bijections. Many people seemed to enjoy the talk and we got lots of great feedback afterwards. We will probably write up … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, haskell, writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

New ICFP functional pearl on subtracting bijections

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Brent

Kenny Foner and I have a paper accepted to ICFP on subtracting bijections. Here’s the basic problem: suppose you have a bijection between two sum types, , and another bijection . Of course and must have the same size, but … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, haskell, writing | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

A (work in progress) translation of Joyal’s original paper on species

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Brent

tl;dr: I’m working on an English translation, with additional commentary, of Joyal’s 1981 paper introducing the concept of combinatorial species. Collaboration and feedback welcome! Back when I was writing my PhD thesis on combinatorial species, I was aware that André … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, projects, species, writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Off the Beaten Track: Explaining Type Errors

Posted on January 21, 2018 by Brent

Last week I gave a talk at Off the Beaten Track 2018 about something that Richard Eisenberg, Harley Eades and I have been thinking about recently: namely, how to generate good interactive error explanations for programmers, especially for type errors. … Continue reading →

Posted in projects, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Typeclassopedia is now up-to-date

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Brent

The title pretty much says it all: I have finally finished (I hope) updating the Typeclassopedia to reflect various recent changes to the language and standard libraries (such as the AMP and BBP/FTP). Along the way I also added more … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, writing | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

New Haskell Symposium paper on “twisted functors”

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Brent

Satvik Chauhan, Piyush Kurur and I have a new paper which will appear at the 2016 Haskell Symposium in Japan: How to Twist Pointers without Breaking Them Although pointer manipulations are used as a primary motivating example, at heart the … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Polynomial Functors Constrained by Regular Expressions

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Brent

I’ve now finished revising the paper that Dan Piponi and I had accepted to MPC 2015; you can find a PDF here: Polynomial Functors Constrained by Regular Expressions Here’s the 2-minute version: certain operations or restrictions on functors can be … Continue reading →

Posted in math, writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Readers wanted!

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Brent

tl;dr: Read a draft of my thesis and send me your feedback by September 9! Over the past year I’ve had several people say things along the lines of, “let me know if you want me to read through your … Continue reading →

Posted in category theory, combinatorics, diagrams, grad school, math, species, writing | Tagged , , , , | 15 Comments

Maniac week

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Brent

Inspired by Bethany Soule (and indirectly by Nick Winter, and also by the fact that my dissertation defense and the start of the semester are looming), I am planning a “maniac week” while Joyia and Noah will be at the … Continue reading →

Posted in grad school, meta, writing | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Introducing diagrams-haddock

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Brent

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