Hi, I'm Fred.
I build software.
I'm interested in programming languages, language games, and how smaller and simpler approaches to programming can turn computers into creative tools for thought. Also, I like Wittgenstein and Buffy.
Long-running obsessions that I'm actively working on. Emphasis on building and shipping code. Occasionally useful. Think home-cooked software.
A minimal and malleable programming language.
Kombucha is a minimal functional programming language that is meant to be used symbiotically within a larger ecosystem and in cooperation with a host language. It prioritizes malleability through flexible syntax and effect handlers.
It is an exploration of building a programming language as home-cooked software, small and personal, yet also useful. (Well, being useful is still a work in progress.)
Simulating academia by writing Buffy papers.
Slayerfest (in collaboration with Victoria Ritvo) is a fully automated conference made up of fully automated academic labs — staffed entirely by AI bots — dedicated to interpreting private conversations about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and turning them into “publishable” scholarship.
The driving philosophy is: If there's a problem... add another bot. The source material: thousands of lines of Buffy-theorizing from a real chat log. The goal: remove the humans who wrote those messages from the interpretive process — entirely. Except as raw data.
(programming |)language(s| games) and weird tangents. Emphasis on sketching out and poking at novel concepts in isolation. Think half-baked ideas.
Lispy minimalism meets prefix/infix/keyword calls — Can a language be as minimal and general as Lisp (where control structures are just functions) while using fewer parentheses and feeling like C/JS-style languages?
Programming with paradoxical loop values — A language for exploring paradoxical fixed points: values that are both true and false. Like solving time travel paradoxes by going back in time and not going back in time, at the same time.
Weekly notes, mostly as a way to collect and clarify my thoughts.
Things I've built in the past. Not actively maintained.