Excerpts from Chat: Discovering Structure and Grokking the True Nature of a Problem

This is an excerpt from a private chat with someone about code and I think it expresses something universal about programming, mathematics and engineering or any discipline where iterative development is necessary to manage complexity and discover simplicity. …about a bit of code where I haven’t quite grasped what needs to happen, or the core […]

Testing Textually Composed Numbers for Primality

Last night on Twitter one of my favorite accounts, @fermatslibrary, put up an interesting post: Start with 82 and go backwards to 1 82818079787776757473727170696867666564636261605958575655545352515049484746454443424140393837363534333231302928272625242322212019181716151413121110987654321 …this number is prime!— Fermat’s Library (@fermatslibrary)November 20, 2019 Start at 82 and write it down, then 81, write that down, etc. until you reach one, and you’ve written a (huge) […]

Erlang: Naive Matrix Multiplication

Someone asked what was surely a homework question today on StackOverflow about matrix multiplication in Erlang. I set out to answer him in as simple a way as possible, but wound up writing a naive matrix generation and multiplication module. The code to the module might be of interest to new Erlangers, as it adheres […]