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Marianne Writes a Programming Language

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

Marianne Bellotti

Marianne Bellotti wants to understand how the people who design programming languages do what they do, so she's jumping right in and giving it a shot by writing her own language. Follow along as she struggles to understand parsers, lexers, grammars, gets philosophical about the nature of error handling and gets in way over her head too easily and too often.
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Top 10 Marianne Writes a Programming Language Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Marianne Writes a Programming Language episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Marianne Writes a Programming Language for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Marianne Writes a Programming Language episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Exceptions Are Not Errors (featuring Smokey Jones)

Exceptions Are Not Errors (featuring Smokey Jones)

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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12/16/20 • 23 min

Inevitably the best way to make design decisions is to practice implementation over and over again. Marianne experiments with writing different types of specs and considers various ways they could be executed under the hood. Midway through she realizes she doesn't actually understand how to think about errors and attempts to do more research while her cat tries to distract her.

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Type Systems (featuring Ron Garcia)

Type Systems (featuring Ron Garcia)

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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03/17/21 • 24 min

Marianne completely underestimates the complexity of type systems and struggled to figure out how inference, checking and conversion work together. After a month of scraping together a smattering of facts, she calls on expert Ron Garcia to help her figure it out.

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Code Generation (featuring Tikhon Jelvis)

Code Generation (featuring Tikhon Jelvis)

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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04/07/21 • 30 min

Part of Marianne’s flash of inspiration came from a talk she’d seen about translating programs to a form Z3, a popular SMT solver, can run as proofs. Full of enthusiasm she invites the software engineer who gave that talk, Tikhon Jelvis, to elaborate on the similarities between SMT and code normally generated by the compiler.

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Series Promo

Series Promo

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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10/27/20 • 2 min

Marianne is writing a programming language. This is probably a terrible idea, but those are always the best ;)

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Uncertain Types part 1 (featuring Maria Gorinova)

Uncertain Types part 1 (featuring Maria Gorinova)

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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03/24/21 • 24 min

Equipped with new knowledge about type systems, Marianne begins speccing out plans to implement uncertain types and inject probabilistic programming into Fault models. She picks the brain of Maria Gorinova—researcher and probabilistic programming evangelist—and wonders if she’s finally bitten off more than she can chew.

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Programs Split Over Multiple Files (featuring Troels Henriksen)
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04/14/21 • 25 min

When thinking about how to create a language where little models can be combined into bigger more complex system models, Marianne struggles to understand why not to take the completely straight forward approach of importing files. While searching for a good explanation she comes across the official blog of Futhark and decides to interview its lead on their design decisions.

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - From Parse Tree to Evaluator (featuring Sarah Withee)

From Parse Tree to Evaluator (featuring Sarah Withee)

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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12/09/20 • 25 min

A parser generator like ANTLR won't handle evaluating programs written in your new language. You need to write the code for that yourself. Marianne explains how to build an AST from a parse tree, create an evaluation loop, and how esolangs (esoteric programming languages) make for great learning tools.

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)

Writing a BNF Grammar (featuring Prof Jeff Heinz)

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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12/02/20 • 27 min

Writing a programming language starts with its grammar. But what is a grammar in the context of computation? And how does one go about writing one? This week Marianne talks with computational linguist Jeff Heinz about Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky and what context-free grammar actually means.

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Certainty is a Programming Bug (featuring Hillel Wayne)

Certainty is a Programming Bug (featuring Hillel Wayne)

Marianne Writes a Programming Language

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11/25/20 • 19 min

What kind of programming language is Marianne trying to write? Before we go any deeper into the guts of language design, Marianne and friend Hillel Wayne debate the shortcomings of various approaches to specifying and modeling program behavior. From first order logic verification to system visualizations, nothing Marianne has used before has quite fit the bill. She's beginning to get philosophical about the nature of abstraction and wants to rebel from the goal of certainty.

Want more programming history/culture/analysis? Sign Up for Hillel's Newsletter.

Hillel's Tutorials on TLA+ and his book Practical TLA+

Mario Livio's comments at the 2010 World Science Festival

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Marianne Writes a Programming Language - Uncertain Types part 2 (featuring Barak Michener and Eric Schles)
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03/31/21 • 27 min

Still struggling to understand how to implement uncertain types, Marianne calls on two friends to sit down with her and brainstorm different approaches. It looks more and more like adding uncertainty will cause the language to scale to impractical levels of computational complexity... then suddenly Marianne has a stroke of inspiration that changes everything.

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FAQ

How many episodes does Marianne Writes a Programming Language have?

Marianne Writes a Programming Language currently has 13 episodes available.

What topics does Marianne Writes a Programming Language cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts and Technology.

What is the most popular episode on Marianne Writes a Programming Language?

The episode title 'Programs Split Over Multiple Files (featuring Troels Henriksen)' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Marianne Writes a Programming Language?

The average episode length on Marianne Writes a Programming Language is 24 minutes.

How often are episodes of Marianne Writes a Programming Language released?

Episodes of Marianne Writes a Programming Language are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Marianne Writes a Programming Language?

The first episode of Marianne Writes a Programming Language was released on Oct 27, 2020.

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