Plurrrr

This mini-article is based on part of a talk I gave about Python API design, but I think the main point holds across programming languages.

Pratt parsers are a beautiful way of solving the operator precedence problem:

How can an expression like 1+2-3*4+5/6^7-8*9 be parsed to meet the expectations of your PEMDAS-trained brain? Where do you put the parentheses? What goes first?

Some documentation of Rust async and await has presented it as a seamless alternative to threads. Just sprinkle these keywords through your code and get concurrency that scales better! I think this is very misleading. An async fn is a different thing from a normal Rust fn, and you need to think about different things to write correct code in each case.

This post presents a different way of looking at async that I think is more useful, and less likely to lead to cancellation-related bugs.

Relational (inner) joins are really common in the world of databases, and one weird thing about them is that it seems like everyone has a different idea of what they are. In this post I’ve aggregated a bunch of different definitions, ways of thinking about them, and ways of implementing them that will hopefully be interesting. They’re not without redundancy, some of them are arguably the same, but I think they’re all interesting perspectives nonetheless.