Concatenative Languages

I've been looking into the rather pompous-sounding genre of concatenative programming languages recently. They are called "concatenative" (essentially 'joining together') because for any 2 programs A and B, the result of run(AB) is the same as the result of run(run(A)run(B)). This also works in reverse, so we can split any program A at any point; if we call the portion on the left side B and the…

Search and Optimisation Streams

After an initial spurt of Javascript hacking, the search algorithm pages in my Wiki seem to have stagnated. Have I given up on yet another project? Not quite; I've been building it into a library!

I realised that it's all well and good explaining what search, optimisation, metaheuristics and the like are, but this information is already available elsewhere. The problem with these techniques is not obscurity (most programmers have probably heard of genetic algorithms, at least), and it's not a lack of…

Currying in Javascript

In Computer Science, "Currying" (named after Haskell Curry) is a method for specialising functions.

Let's say we had the following function, which takes 2 numbers and gives their product:


We can study functions like this by using Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus system. Church's system does not allow us to write a function which…