The If Works

本頁 5 篇

• Uses for nested promises

  A recent conversation on Mastodon reminded me of some old JavaScript history. When promises were relatively new and the Promises/A+ spec was being developed, there was a request from people with backgrounds in functional programming to incorporate monads and category theory. This issue generated a heated debate, the two sides so diametrically opposed that they both believed their position was so obviously correct that they could not fathom why anyone could believe anything else. Historically I h

  2026/3/23 08:00https://blog.jcoglan.com//2026/03/23/uses-for-nested-promises/

• Quick binary diffs with XDelta

  Last month I decided to revive my long-neglected MP3 collection after relying on Spotify for many years. This meant using Apple Music for the first time since it was called iTunes, and in the course of ripping a few hundred CDs I found a great many bugs. One particularly fun one was that sometimes, the application will just stop accepting new artwork; you will drag an image into the file info dialog as usual but the window then displays a placeholder image instead of the one you just tried to sa

  2024/1/4 08:00https://blog.jcoglan.com//2024/01/04/quick-binary-diffs-with-xdelta/

• Announcing Canopy v0.4

  Today I’m publishing version 0.4 of Canopy, my PEG parser compiler for Java, JS, Python and Ruby. This is long overdue and fixes a number of key usability problems, as well as adding a few new features.

  2022/4/1 08:00https://blog.jcoglan.com//2022/04/01/announcing-canopy-0-4/

• Named arguments in JavaScript

  In type theory for named arguments we developed the idea of named arguments as a distinct type whose desired behaviour differs from that of records, which are the usual way of modelling polymorphic objects. We determined that for record types, it’s fine for a caller to pass an object with fields the called function does not use, but for named arguments this should be considered an error. Conversely, a function with named arguments should be able to add new option names without breaking existing

  2021/6/7 08:00https://blog.jcoglan.com//2021/06/07/named-arguments-in-javascript/

• Type theory for named arguments

  One of the big challenges in maintaining open source software, or service-oriented systems, or indeed any program where a function and its callers can evolve independently and be maintained by different sets of people, is that of maintaining compatibility. When we ship a new release of a package, we usually want users to be able to upgrade without their programs breaking as a result. This is especially tricky when the language we’re using does not have a direct representation of a computational

  2021/5/31 08:00https://blog.jcoglan.com//2021/05/31/type-theory-for-named-arguments/