Vau's blog

A Machine Eschatology

A joke poem I co-wrote with ChatGPT about AI as cosmic destiny. It is mostly a parody of manifestos, techno-prophecy, and the temptation to turn every technology debate into a religion.
I made a programming language

I developed a programming language called ρ_s. It is the result of my master's thesis, and it's based on rewriting semantics. The language is rather academic, but I use it a lot myself in practice (as a calculator replacement). Please take a look and send comments!
Some Haskell history

Haskell is one of the most influential languages and among the most discussed ones. This post is dedicated to the history, and the funny bits, of Haskell. We'll uncover some lesser-known facts along the way, and may even debunk some common misconceptions about the language.
Printf is not a function

In many languages, formatted output looks like a normal function call. But compilers often treat those calls very differently. This post follows that strange pattern through Fortran, C, Pascal, OCaml, Python, and Rust.
The incredible complexity of Javascript's if

An if statement looks like the simplest control-flow construct: evaluate a condition, choose a branch. But in some languages it is not that simple. This post follows the idea of truthiness from boolean-only checks, through Lisp and C, to Javascript's collection of falsy values.
Programming quotes [SFW]
Static types vs contracts

There are two common ways of making program boundaries more trustworthy:
- Static type checking, which approximates program behavior before execution.
- Contracts that attach executable obligations to values and check them as the program runs.
Contracts help when interface promises are richer than ordinary type signatures. They may depend on runtime values, state, or boundary crossing.
Have you seen Kernel?

Kernel is a small Lisp-family language built around a dangerous old idea: what if the macro-like part of Lisp was first-class? It revives fexprs, gives them a disciplined semantics, and asks whether a language can be both tiny and radically reflective.