Thomas Nelson's Personal Website

Here’s a collection of talks or articles that I really enjoy. The Error Model Joe Duffy describes the error model in an experimental programming language that he worked on. Starts off by describing different ways that programming languages give programmers to express and deal with errors. He discusses the pros and cons of each strategy, and then goes on to describe how they designed around those problems to create something truly unique. [Read More]

I can expand more or add to this list later, but here’s a quick list of books I love: Albert Camus - The Fall Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Aldous Huxley - Island Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis George Orwell - 1984 George Orwell - Animal Farm George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia H. [Read More]

Java Willing to take a small speed decrease in order to have a much better time programming than C/C++ Need to interface with <~Obscure Technology~>. Because Java probably has a library for it Kotlin Want/need to use Java libraries but want to feel modern Groovy I want to write a version of Java that gets rid of everything good about Java while keeping all of the bad C Need the maximum amount of speed possible C++ Need the maximum amount of speed possible while also having the maximum number of language features that don’t fit together Javascript Need to write something quick for the browser Typescript Need to write something large for the browser Python Short scripts, one-offs Want to have a good time programming while not caring about speed or ease of refactoring Go Want the power of concurrency, but don’t want to actually learn concurrency Clojure Want/need to use Java libraries but are a hipster Rich Hickey is my spirit animal Seriously though, Clojure is really good for processing data. [Read More]

Best Practices Everything is Code Advantages: Copy paste! Easily take concepts from one project and use them in another Source control. See who changed what why. Rebuilding. If you have everything in source control, it becomes way easier to rebuild in case of a disaster. Editing. You know what computers are really good at? Manipulating text. Take advantage of that by expressing everything as text. And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING that you possibly can. [Read More]