Allan Clark

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I’m a programmer in Edinburgh. I write here mostly about programming languages and their features; types, laziness, syntax design, and how little evidence we actually have for the things we believe about them. I think many of my posts do not take a strong position or if they do I end up arguing against it.

I am currently interested in a new position, if you are hiring, please see my CV.

Unrelated to most things here, but if you’re interested in sports predictions I run a prediction game for Formula One and Formula E races/seasons. We also have occasional over/under questions mostly for football. See poleprediction.

Start here

Ladybird overtakes Servo: Why?
A C++ browser engine is outpacing a Rust one, this goes against my priors that stronger guarantees are generally good for programming so I listed other reasons why this might happen, but I wasn’t convinced by any of them.
Small functions and Elm
Function length is the wrong proxy for the thing we actually want.
Weak typing - What is it good for
Probably not absolutely nothing, but I think weakly typed languages are mostly useless, so I try to steelman the case for one
Dynamically/Statically typed language and meta-programming
Why you can write a generic admin panel in Python and not in Elm — explained down at the level of what’s actually in memory.
Laziness would be good for Time.Extra.posixToParts
A good example of what I think laziness is good for, allowing natural structuring code
Stacks and Laziness
The follow-up where I explain why laziness is not a silver bullet that always works.
Structural Custom Types
Extensible union types are often proposed. I think the important difference is between structural and nominal types, and that this should be uniform across records and custom types.
Scoring Orders
Our F1 prediction scoring let a randomly-generated guess beat a nearly-correct one. Here’s the system I built to fix it.
Legal standing analogy
Before proposing a feature, show standing. An under-rated analogy from Dillon Kearns.
Review: Mo Gawdat: Diary of a CEO
I go through a podcast episode I was asked to listen to, and find that there isn’t much substance to the arguments.

Recent

2026-08-26 Lambdas (again) and def syntax
2026-08-20 Link: Mojo is now open source
2026-08-19 Video Link: Jayaprabhakar Kadarkarai - Create your own DSLs
2026-08-15 Link: python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird
2026-08-15 Link: Why Go is an Ideal Language for AI-Assisted Software Engineering
2026-08-10 Link: Danluu.pl: Programming language and token efficiency
2026-08-07 Video Link: Reliability lessons from SQLite at Software Should Work
2026-08-06 Link: Twenty years of Pandoc

All 173 posts →