Hi, I'm Frederic. I build software.

I'm interested in programming languages, philosophy (especially Wittgenstein), hypertext systems, and how smaller and simpler approaches to programming can turn computers into creative tools for thought.

Notes

I write weekly notes about programming language ideas and experiments:

June 2025

• RC Week 6: a game of life for language evolution?
• RC Week 5: hot reload with replay semantics?
• RC Week 4: building a language to write a blog post
• RC Week 3: A Gentle Introduction to Vorpal
• RC Week 2: Pattern Matching, VM Instruction Set

May 2025

• RC Week 1: Vorpal—A Minimal and Malleable Language
• 12 Weeks of Writing Weekly Lab Notes
• Throw Away the Compiler, But Keep the Tests
• A Stack-Based Bytecode VM for Vorpal

April 2025

• One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: Throwing Away All Code, Every Day
• Reasonable Macros (From Fexprs to Explicit Bindings)
• What Makes a Programming Language Powerful?
• Minimal Modern Syntax (Without (All (the ())))

March 2025

• Custom Binding Constructs Without Macros, Part 3: Generalizable Sugar
• Custom Binding Constructs Without Macros, Part 2: Desugaring Bindings
• Custom Binding Constructs Without Macros, Part 1: Explicit Bindings
• A Static Site Generator in Lambda Calculus With Effect Handlers
• Turning Lambda Calculus Into a Minimal Programming Language

Projects

• A statically-typed language, Garble, that compiles to boolean circuits.
• A PostScript quine that draws itself as a random maze whenever it's printed.
• A hypertext system that is both a document and graph DB, written in Rust.
• A md/pdf/epub pipeline and generative cover art for Wittgenstein ebooks.
• A visualization of connections in Wittgenstein's philosophical Nachlass.
• A PhD dissertation on Wittgenstein, diagonalization, Cantor, Gödel and Turing.