Witnessed several discussions recently (both online and irl) about "how can someone teach X without being taught X", I realised that most major things I've been teaching — software evolution, software construction, software modelling, etc — I've never had as courses as a student.

After much careful deliberation, we are happy to announce 5 Best Paper winners and 2 Diamond Best Paper winners, selected among 1000+ JSS papers from 2020: medium.com/jss-editors-se… If you are a winner, congratulations! Otherwise, add all these to your reading list!

Important result for software language engineering: Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. It’s not the same as language, and it’s not the same as maths and logic. (DOI: doi.org/10.7554/eLife.…) Summary: news.mit.edu/2020/brain-rea…

Today I learnt that "upstairs water" is a thing.

Can we have context-free syntax highlighting? We have regular syntax highlighting at home…

And now it is time for the Most Influential Paper of JSS! The finalists are announced below (in the Medium post and in this @Twitter thread), please vote for your favourite by using the "clap" feature. medium.com/jss-editors-se…

And now an explicit moment of our unwavering appreciation for JSS reviewers, without which it would simply be impossible to maintain the high standards of quality. We like them all, but the best of the best in 2020 are: medium.com/jss-editors-se…

How to explain Normal Distribution to a bro in the gym

Got myself involved in another systematic literature review. Reading papers from 1980s and 1990s is such an entertaining experience! Some of them are really like "we took this existing method and applied it to one C program", and others are easily worth 10+ modern publons.

When life gives you lemmas, prove them.

Things you learn when you write tools supporting your systematic literature review: you cannot spell "interlanguage" without "Erlang"!

In for some compiler hacking today? Join us at the RaincodeLabs Compiler Coding Dojo 2021! Spoofax, Smalltalk and LLVM is our menu, with talks by Eelco Visser , Marcus Denker and Dimitri Racordon. Vadim Zaytsev and I will be happy to receive you! 2021.programming-conference.org/home/cocodo-20… #prog21

Today is the start of ‹Programming› 2025, and even more importantly, the day of #CoCoDo! I didn't travel anywhere and didn't get to meet anyone in person, but at least I received a conference-style breakfast:

Right now live at #CoCoDo: Eelco Visser demoing @Spoofax. Hurry up and join through ‹Programming› 2025's Discord and Zoom!

#CoCoDo/#prog21 speaker: "llvm.org has an optimiser phase because we are humans and we do not write well-optimised code!" My inner voice: "writing non-optimised code? speak for yourself!" My students' code in the background:

To be fair to the reviewer, this does not guarantee that one understands the work one published before :)

Greg Michaelson's talk at #prog21 started with interesting contemplations of where programming paradigms came from and how to teach them, and quickly deteriorated to the author bashing Python and Haskell as being "horrible" and "unrealistic". Puzzling.

Attending codehag's guest lecture at Universitetet i Bergen on TC39, JavaScript and related topics. One of the nice sides of everyone working remotely!

Is it BabyCobol-proof? Join the Strumenta Community for the Virtual Meetup with Vadim Zaytsev tomorrow the 15th of April at 6 PM!

I figured it out by year 3, but it didn't work so I had to rewrite it with a different title in year 5...