Introduction

This post kicks off a hands-on series about program synthesis—the art of generating small programs from examples. We’ll build a tiny, FlashFill-style synthesiser that learns to turn strings like “Joshua Nkomo” into “J. Nkomo” from input/output pairs. We’ll see how to define a tiny string-manipulation language, write an interpreter, and search the space of programs to find one that solves our toy problem.

My fondness for alternative Haskells

I’ve been working on a dataframe implementation in Haskell for about a year now. While my focus has been on ergonomics the question of performance has inevitably come up. I haven’t made significant performance investments but I thought it might be worth snapshotting the performance to establish a baseline.