While the physicists investigate the nature of the mysterious portal that has recently appeared in North London, several human beings recently came through the portal, which appears to be a gate into an alternative universe. As we understood from the last two people coming through the portal, it seems to be a linked with a universe that is in many ways like ours, reached about the same level of social and technological development, but differs in numerous curious details. The paths through which people in [...]

In most discussions about how to make programming better, someone eventually says something along the lines of "we'll just have to wait until deep learning solves the problem!" I think this is a naively optimistic idea, but it raises one interesting question: In what sense are programs created using deep learning a different kind of programs than those written by hand? This question recently arose in discussions that we have been having as part of the PROGRAMme project, which explores historical and phi[...]

For a long time, I've been thinking about how to design a data visualization library that would make it easier to compose charts from simple components. On the one hand, there are charting libraries like Google Charts, which offer a long list of pre-defined charts. On the other hand, there are libraries like D3.js, which let you construct any data visualization, but in a very low-level way. There is also Vega, based the idea of grammar of graphics, which is somewhere in between, but requires you to specify[...]

Most real-world programming languages are too complex to be studied using formal methods. For this reason, academics often work with simple theoretical languages instead. The λ-calculus is a simple formal language that is often used for talking about functional languages, the π-calculus is a model of concurrent programming and there is an entire book, A Theory of Objects modelling various object-oriented systems. Animation from Financial Times article "Why the world's recycling system stopped working". Tho[...]

Despite having the term science in its name, it is not always clear what kind of discipline computer science actually is. Research on programming is sometimes like science, sometimes like mathematics, sometimes like engineering, sometimes like design and sometimes like art. It also has a long tradition of importing ideas from a wide range of other disciplines. In this article, I will look at ideas from architecture and urban planning. Architecture has already been an inspiration for design patterns, althou[...]