wlog

Without Loss of Generality

Here comes another blog about computer science and maths things I’m working on or interested in. I had one before, called The Distributive Law, which was mainly maths, but I haven’t updated it in (checks notes) six years. That’s a long time.

Since then, my interests have shifted much more towards programming, and several of the projects I’ve been working on recently have involved some neat ideas that I want to write about. I also want to switch away from Nibbleblog, the software I used for my previous blog.⁠Not that there is anything wrong with Nibbleblog — it has served me well, and I’d still recommend it. I’m just not using many of its features, and I want something more like a static site generator. So I think it makes more sense to start another blog with a different focus, rather than revive the old one.

It’s also a good opportunity to make something with Papyri, which is my own programmable markup language. I’ve been working on Papyri for several years, and it’s been through a few rewrites, but this year I’ve finally published a compiler for it, written in Rust. So this blog is written in Papyri; the source code for the blog is here, for anyone interested in what that looks like.

So, here’s the new blog. It’s called “wlog”, which to mathematicians means “without loss of generality”, but also it sounds a bit like “blog”. It’ll be about my projects and interests, which are often pretty abstract; currently that means algorithms, programming language design and implementation, and a bit of game development. Those are fairly specialised topics, but I’m also interested in computer science education, so I’d like to write some posts aimed at novice programmers, too.

I’m not sure how often I’ll post. There will definitely be periods of months when I don’t post anything. But hopefully at least in the short term, updates will be relatively frequent; I have a bit of a backlog of things to write about.