My previous post was a large-scale comparison of approaches to voting based on modeling voters and simulating elections. I ran into a specific wrinkle there that I want to comment on from a more theoretical point of view. One question I set out to explore was how much voters benefit…

Democracy: a concept almost universally revered, underpinned by the foundational act of voting. However, interpreting voting results to make fair and representative decisions is anything but straightforward. While it’s tempting to think the option with the most votes should just triumph, reality proves more complex. Our elections are held together…

Here, I present the (lightly edited) story of using ChatGPT conversationally to solve a non-trivial problem in Haskell. It definitely gets some things wrong, and it’s still unclear whether co-developing this with ChatGPT made anything easier than it would have been otherwise. But in any case, it was definitely a…

I found this to be an interesting way to ponder the theory of elections and group decision-making, so I’m writing to share. I have not done the research to become aware of what is previously known in this area, and I make no claim that any of the thoughts contained…

The standard definition of a monoid goes something like this: a monoid is any set (if you’re a mathematician) or type (if you’re a Haskell programmer), together with an associative binary operation ∗ (if you’re a mathematician) or <> (if you’re a Haskeller) that has an identity. That’s nice and…

Hi everyone, This Saturday, I’m once again hosting a virtual Haskell CoHack. In the past, we’ve had a great time with groups here working on various projects, whether it’s learning Haskell, hacking on GHC, writing documentation, making progress on personal projects, or just hanging out to chat with like-minded folk…

The September chapter of the Virtual Haskell CoHack is now past. Here’s how it went: We had 12 people in attendance overall, ranging from experienced Haskell programmers to the novice and intermediate level. We had a great time getting to know each other and hearing each other’s Haskell stories. One…

Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about something that would be nice to have in GHC. Motivation #1: HMock Predicates Consider the Predicate type from HMock: data Predicate a = Predicate { showPredicate :: String, showNegation :: String, accept :: a -> Bool, explain :: a -> String } The purpose of this…

I’ve put together a neat example lately of using FRP (Functional Reactive Programming) to cleanly separate and model the interactions of the pieces of an interactive application: in this case, an RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) calculator. In this article, I present the Haskell code for this application using the Reflex…