Howdy

I write about software and finance, languages and literature.

Some Recent Posts:

Interview With Technomancy - Jul 2025

Technomancy made Leinigen, leads the Fennel project and makes beautiful games!

Janet Commonplace - Jul 2025

Questions, resources and thoughts about Janet, a minimalist Clojure-like with native binaries.

Which Language Has the Most Words - Jun 2025

How many words do we have with wave, waves, wavey, wavelet and wavelets? Might Webster or Johnson have built a different tradition of dictionary making?

Persian Christianity - May 2025

Few Persians today know the period between Darius and the Islamic conquests well, about their region’s Christian past.

Is AI the End of Programming Languages? - May 2025

Karpathy and fans call English the hottest new programming language. I guess COBOL’s retro now.

WIP Coupling Language and Geography - May 2025

Historical linguistics has a lot to teach us about API/DSL design. While a decades old codebase may be a crime scene, human languages have endured magnitudes more churn!

Notes on Persianate India - Mar 2025

In the 1820s, the East India Company replaced Persian with English