This is not a tutoral on monads, nor will I use any math terms here. This is for people who have learned enough about monads to use them, but want to get a better picture of what they’re doing and why they exist. Functions One way to develop a first intuition about monads is to follow the progression of abstractions [...]

The artice on Git that I wrote a couple years back, Git From the Bottom Up, has been translated into Japanese by Noriyuki Komatsuzaki. Thank you so much, Noriyuki! [...]

The following is an amalgam of several letters I sent to Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, expressing my concern about the direction GPL licensing is taking, and why I disagree with some of the objectives of the Free Software Foundation. [...]

After spending a good while trying to understand monads in Haskell, and why the Haskell world is so fascinated by them, I finally understand why they aren’t as exciting to other languages, or why they are completely missing from languages like C++: because they’re mostly already there. At its simplest, a monad is an abstraction of a value which knows how to apply functions to that value, returning a new monad. In other words, it’s a way to turn values into little packages that wrap additional functionality around that value. Sounds a lot like what an object does… [...]

I’ve seen this issue mentioned in some random and hard to reach places on the Net, so I thought I’d re-express it here for those who find Google sending them this way. UPDATE: According to the discussion at https://trac.macports.org/ticket/27237, the real problem here is not fully dynamic string, but the use of _GLIBCXXDEBUG. So I recommend ignoring what follows, as it will help you on Snow Leopard or Lion with gcc 4.6 and above. [...]

I’ve been managing my Ledger project with Git for some time now, and I’ve finally settled into a comfortable groove concerning branches and where to commit stuff. [...]