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dr g

@mccaskill.bsky.social

serious about software, dabbles with drumming

22 Followers  |  67 Following  |  35 Posts  |  Joined: 10.10.2023  |  2.2603

Latest posts by mccaskill.bsky.social on Bluesky

Cory Doctorow at CF 25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It
YouTube video by CloudFest Cory Doctorow at CF 25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It

Excellent video from Cory Doctorow which I contrived to miss when it came out. Full of depressing facts, but with some ideas of how EU governments can fight back: youtu.be/_Ai-fC-2Bpo

29.08.2025 15:17 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Sounds like a good idea! Try the email you have for me, I've had it a long time now.....

26.07.2025 17:30 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Cheers Keith! Much as I love #fsharp, I also enjoy this new wave of using C well; File Pilot is wonderful example of how badly the tech giants' enshitified software is bloated in comparison. In these agentic MCP/LLM times, I hope sanity hasn't arrived too late. Is AI any good for legacy systems?

26.07.2025 15:45 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I guess the Tech Bros are going to be our new dealers. Steve Yegge is paying about $100 a day for his habit, according to his Pragmatic Engineer interview: youtu.be/TZE33qMYwsc?...

22.07.2025 07:20 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I wonder if my love of using #fsharp is going to mutate into a hobby like making hardwood furniture for the joy of the craft. Or maybe LLMs will get good at writing F# in my style, and I can choose to review their code in it.

22.07.2025 07:13 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025
YouTube video by Better Software Conference Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

@cmuratori.bsky.social‬ gives a compelling analysis of OOP. I wrote production code from the late 80s, using C, which was perfect timing, since OOP has only ever been a thought experiment to me. I like ADTs and DUs, and my new C is #fsharp, which does ADTs better than C.

youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI

17.07.2025 19:53 β€” πŸ‘ 10    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Resplendent In The Light Of The Universe (DiN93), by Field Lines Cartographer 8 track album

@FLCartographer at the other place, is making the music I love to listen to during my day, especially while writing #fsharp software.

dinrecords.bandcamp.com/album/resple...

04.07.2025 17:34 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
File Pilot: Design Meets Performance | Vjekoslav KrajačiΔ‡
YouTube video by Wookash Podcast File Pilot: Design Meets Performance | Vjekoslav KrajačiΔ‡

Just finished watching a great interview with the maker of File Pilot. It has an excellent overview of how and why he writes software, and cites the influence of @cmuratori.bsky.social on his choices: youtu.be/pS2oLNR1PO8

30.04.2025 12:37 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Journalist sues OpenAI over misuse of work, personal data - TechCentral.ie β€œIt is my work, my intellectual property, my personal data. Not his. I didn’t give permission to use that.” Carole Cadwalladr is holding OpenAI’s Sam Altman accountable, suing him. She announced that ...

Just stumbled on Carole's recent Ted Talk, shedding light few others are reporting on the grand theft and power grab in front of all our eyes. There is a link to the talk in the article: techcentral.ie/journalist-sue

28.04.2025 14:49 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Movie you've watched more than six times using gifs

27.04.2025 06:26 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Imp-77", Edinburgh ML", Prolog", Pascal", Occam", Ada", C*, Miranda/Haskell", C++", C#", F#"

my production code was written in the 80s/90s in C, in what I would, with hindsight, describe as an abstract data type imperative style. #fsharp makes that much easier than C, while offering so much more.

16.04.2025 19:51 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Wonderful! Does tldraw currently have 1 to many arrows? I couldn't find that, doh!

13.03.2025 18:33 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

There is so much to like about gleam!

Two things put me off gleam:

I love using camelCase. They won't let me.

A major feature of F#, which has been shown to encourage better code bases, is the lack of forward references.

Not having forward references can be a pain until you reap its benefits.

13.03.2025 12:37 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

not a bad bookshelf to find yourself on. Just a few books away from Benjamin C. Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" (System F implemented in OCaml anyone?), and Umberto Eco's "The Island of the DayΒ  Before". Cool!

12.03.2025 09:38 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

The #fsharp world mostly uses the term workflow rather than monad, so I was tickled by Scott's choice; only FP students know what a monad is. I asked GPT about the monad vs workflow wars in F#, and it explained it all: seq {} is closer to an applicative functor than a monad because it lacks bind

11.03.2025 19:51 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 0

@tldraw.com continue to impress me with their choices in shape and interconnect layout.

I first noticed them last year via their harnessing of LLMs to help with diagram content choices, but the quality of their pixel placement is the thing that gives me most joy.

11.03.2025 14:30 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I should have tagged my post about Scott's talk with #fsharp, since I forgot to mention that it is a brilliant example of the application of F#, as well as a great explanation of more general design ideas.

11.03.2025 08:51 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Superb talk by Scott, I was surprised by how much was new to me, like him combining different monads. Ending with a tie in to HATEOAS was an unexpected delight; I only discovered HTMX just a few months back.....

10.03.2025 11:41 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 1

Hamilton consistently makes interesting videos, and flies the flag for using #fsharp. Unfortunately I have to agree with him on his given tier, which has absolutely nothing to do with its excellence as a general purpose programming language, and everything to do with Microsoft's lack of vision.

03.03.2025 09:45 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

ps. I hate that Microsoft never properly supported 3D APIs for dotnet. Some #fsharp early demos did great stuff with 3D because there were working and easy to use dotnet DLLs for that technology.

Microsoft's 3D technology needed dotnet DLL bindings. For C# folks too.

02.03.2025 17:34 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

by humans I mean everyone except those specific developers implementing an automatic file import or export for a computer program.

02.03.2025 17:24 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I would say:

#fsharp is the best general purpose programming language. Microsoft tragically uses it only as a lipstick source for its Java clone.

Humans should not have been shown XML, never mind asked to actually write stuff in it.

WPF's primary API should have been a regular dotnet DLL.

02.03.2025 16:13 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Excellent video by Nic Barker on UI layout. I am looking forward to trying out some ideas from his very clearly explained development approach and experience in my own #fsharp GUI projects (e.g. I have a pet tree layout control).

02.03.2025 13:14 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Quote from Dijkstra's "Go To Considered Harmful" paper using the word "us".

Quote from Dijkstra's "Go To Considered Harmful" paper using the word "us".

I worry about you missing stuff from use of the word "us". First paper I thought of checking is by Dijkstra, not that he, sadly, will be posting on Bluesky

16.02.2025 19:59 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

To paraphrase from Jerry Maguire, Tarau had me at "Kolmogorov-Chaitin algorithmic complexity". More seriously, as I have no idea what that means, your code in iso.fsx is a pleasure to read, and such a great advert for #fsharp expressiveness.

15.02.2025 16:42 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

||> makes that easier, and it is very much worth learning how to fold. My remark was more a reflection on when to use it once it is a tool you have available. I see #fsharp as the best widely available general purpose programming language which can do "functional programming" when that is needed.

14.02.2025 20:52 β€” πŸ‘ 4    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

||> certainly makes writing folds easier to read. My problem is that I find that "older" me no longer understands "clever" folds I wrote a month ago, so though I am pleased I learned how to do folding, I usually employ mutable variables in a very local context rather than faffing about with folds.

14.02.2025 19:52 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0
Grey beanie hat with embroidered #fsharp logo in blue, surrounded by pretentious book covers.

Grey beanie hat with embroidered #fsharp logo in blue, surrounded by pretentious book covers.

Pipelining is key to the magical concise expressiveness of #fsharp, and Don's choice of |> for the op syntax is superb, especially in a ligature supporting font like Fira. As a contrarian, I am also a huge fan of ◁ for avoiding long ( ) runs. In other news, here is the hat I recently had made:

14.02.2025 19:38 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Your quip is much funnier to me having just read Richard Gabriel's "The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution" because of your stimulating Adventure Calculus post. I have long been troubled by how much of life is a game. It's enough to drive you to Camus' Absurdism, which I did last week.

05.02.2025 19:36 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Volume One, by Kosmischer LΓ€ufer 5 track album

On a related thought, this wonderous evocation of 70s East Germany, through the medium of electronic music, is definitely worth checking out (I think the later albums just keep getting better):
kosmischerlaufer.bandcamp.com/album/volume...

13.01.2025 12:33 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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