wcrichton

6 ms·

1.
A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await(cel.cs.brown.edu)
462 points by wcrichton 8d ago|134 comments
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CSCI 1377: Tools For Thought (Spring 2026)(cel.cs.brown.edu)
2 points by wcrichton 4mo ago|0 comments
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by wcrichton 11mo ago
My personal site ( https://willcrichton.net/ ), lab site ( https://cel.cs.brown.edu/ ), and Mastodon page ( https://mastodon.social/@tonofcrates ) are all good ways to follow me!
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by wcrichton 11mo ago
(Author here) That's exactly why I built this for Rust, and why it's difficult to replicate in any other language.
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C++ to Rust Phrasebook(cel.cs.brown.edu)
221 points by wcrichton 1y ago|78 comments
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Evaluating Human Factors Beyond Lines of Code(blog.sigplan.org)
1 points by wcrichton 2y ago|0 comments
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by wcrichton 2y ago
My issue is that this article is trying to use cognitive load in its specific, academic meaning. It says: > The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it become
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by wcrichton 2y ago
I'm not saying that the conclusions in the article are false. As a programmer, I prefer composition to inheritance, too. I'm saying that the justifications are presented using a scientific term of art (cognitive load), but the
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by wcrichton 2y ago
The article is attempting to use a scientific term of art, "cognitive load", to justify claims about programming. Those claim cannot be justified given the existing evidence about cognitive load. As I explain in my linked response
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by wcrichton 2y ago
I did my PhD at Stanford about the cognitive aspects of programming, including studies of cognitive load. This article uses pseudoscience to justify folk theories about programming. I would encourage readers to take everything with a grain
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by wcrichton 2y ago
Do you believe that you could implement the Airbnb interface without any CSS or Javascript?
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by wcrichton 3y ago
Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you int
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by wcrichton 3y ago
Yes, this was my first and probably last experiment using participants from Mechanical Turk. Just too unpredictable.
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by wcrichton 3y ago
For the curious, I have done some experiments on working memory and programming: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06305 > Program tracing, or mentally simulating a program on concrete inputs, is an important part of gener
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Quizicist: AI-Powered Quiz Generation(quizici.st)
2 points by wcrichton 4y ago|1 comments
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Thanks for the bug report, I will fix that.
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Not yet, but that is a high priority TODO. The simplest toolchain is just "Page Print > Save to PDF", but I need to first improve the printer-oriented CSS. There's a broader issue of layout, like if you want to print a Not
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Quarto is a good example where their design requires users to understand many different DSLs to achieve the end result. Just in their code sample you have: * YAML for the page metadata (title: ...) * Markdown (```{python}...```) * Custom in
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by wcrichton 4y ago
AFAIK Pandoc doesn't really have a story for interaction. Like, "show a tooltip when someone clicks on this text". That's the main value add for Nota. Nota doesn't require users to specify the implementations of thi
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by wcrichton 4y ago
A goal for Nota is to gracefully degrade in the absence of Javascript. This already mostly works, since we do server-side rendering to fully generate the HTML contents of the document before providing it to the client. When you first visi
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Academic writing is definitely a target application area for Nota (since I am an academic). Philosophically, Nota combines together all the ideas I think are needed to make a better platform for writing documents like academic papers that a
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Very cool! Yeah that's about the closest thing to Nota I've seen so far. Haven't seen Urlang, I'll have to check that out.
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Nota's syntax is heavily inspired by Scribble. You can think about Nota as "web-native Scribble", or "what if Scribble was written in Javascript".
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by wcrichton 4y ago
I'm targeting people who are writing documents: bloggers, academics, textbook writers, that sort of thing. Certainly Nota requires a level of technical expertise to use right now, but I have a WYSIWYG editor as a distant-future TODO. I
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Yes, I think course notes or textbooks are a great candidate for Notafication. I sadly don't teach 242 anymore since I just graduated, but I'll certainly use it for my next course. I would be happy to support y'all in using N
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Nota is really two things: 1. An alternative syntax (vs. JSX) for writing React programs. 2. A set of React components for structuring a web document As a syntax, Nota is meant to make writing prose-heavy React easier. As a set of component
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Thanks! Currently, I have no plans to convince users of Nota's longevity. It is a research prototype, and I will pursue it as long as I have the time and still think it's a good idea. My hope is that in the near-term, I (or other
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by wcrichton 4y ago
There isn't, and I would say Nota is not suitable for e.g. a commenting syntax on a forum. It's intended for blog posts, papers, or other documents coming from more trusted sources.
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by wcrichton 4y ago
Nota can express any HTML document. It uses KaTeX for math, so it is as expressive as KaTeX. The goal isn't really to compete with lightweight markup languages like Markdown. There are plenty of those. The goal is to provide a language
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by wcrichton 4y ago
I originally tried using MDX. But in my experience, JSX syntax is better suited for writing websites than writing documents. The <Tag></Tag> syntax is more verbose than @Tag{}. I ended up having to do lots of raw string emb

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