Computing

Computing is where I make ideas precise enough to test. This section covers software, mathematics, data and the systems that connect them.

Code is very good at finding assumptions you forgot you made. Something can make perfect sense on paper and still fall apart once a program has to handle every case. I like that about programming. It forces the fuzzy bits into the open.

That is why computing keeps showing up elsewhere on the site. A mathematical idea may need a library, while a language question may need a corpus or a model. And sometimes a boring administrative task simply deserves a small program so I don’t have to do it twice. Programming is sometimes the subject itself, too.

The projects here range from long-running C++ work to practical applications and experiments with language data. I try to document what a program does and why it ended up shaped that way. The things that changed, especially the ideas that looked sensible at first and weren’t, are usually worth writing down.