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Eric Lippert @ericlippert

Eric Lippert is a programming language designer; prior work includes the C#, Hack, JavaScript and Bean Machine compilers. Blog at ericlippert.com.

Joined January 2011
  • Tweets 2,677
  • Following 476
  • Followers 18,619
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I'm heading over to bsky.app/profile/ericlippert…, hope to see you there!

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Today on FAIC: putting together a simple pattern matching combinator library in Python. ericlippert.com/2023/03/21/b…
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Today on FAIC: Why did I build a combinator-inspired transformation pass in the first place? Because it's fun! Also, other reasons. ehttps://ericlippert.com/2023/02/23/bean-machine-retrospective-part-8/
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Today on FAIC: After that brief digression about combinatory logic, we'll start using some of those ideas to solve compiler problems. ericlippert.com/2023/02/08/b…

Bean Machine Retrospective, part 7

How do we write a compiler in a typical general-purpose line-of-business OO programming language such as Python, C#, Java, and so on? Compilers are programs, so we could make the question more gene…

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Today on FAIC: Finishing up my quick introduction to combinatory logic with the starling; next time we'll see how this inspired some of the design for my Bean Machine compiler. ericlippert.com/2023/02/03/t…

The names of birds, part 4

The European starling is a lovely looking bird, though territorial, noisy and aggressive up close. Unfortunately, they are very invasive in North America. Most of the hundreds of millions of Europe…

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Today on FAIC: Can you prove that an egocentric kestrel is lonely? ericlippert.com/2023/02/01/t…

The names of birds, part 3

In the autumn of last year my friend Joan and I went on a little trip up to the Skagit valley north of Seattle to photograph birds of prey; I managed to get a blurry but recognizable shot of this c…

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Today on FAIC: a follow-up to my previous post exploring the question "*intuitively*, why can a bird without a fixpoint and a mockingbird not co-exist in a compositional forest?" What's the connection between those three concepts? ericlippert.com/2023/01/30/t…

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Today on FAIC: I'm interrupting my series on Bean Machine to talk briefly about combinatory logic; it'll all make sense eventually I'm sure. ericlippert.com/2023/01/17/t…
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Today on FAIC: An overview of "simplified Python" ericlippert.com/2023/01/05/b…

Bean Machine Retrospective, part 6

Happy New Year all! Last time I briefly described the basic strategy of the Beanstalk compiler: transform the source code of each queried or observed function (and transitively their callees) …

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Today on FAIC: How does Bean Machine treat a call to random variable function as the abstract notion of "a random variable" instead of a distribution object, or a sample from that distribution? By using one simple trick! ericlippert.com/2022/12/20/b…

Bean Machine Retrospective, part 5

Let’s take another look at the “hello world” example and think more carefully about what is actually going on: @random_variable def fairness():   return Beta(2,2) @random_variable…

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Today on FAIC: A brief digression to discuss toasters, network configuration and Alexa -- and to congratulate some former colleagues. ericlippert.com/2022/12/14/i…

I want toast

I’ll get back to Bean Machine and Beanstalk in the next episode; today, a brief diversion to discuss a general principle of language design and congratulate some of my former colleagues. Back…

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Today on FAIC: three years ago I was given the challenge of extracting a Bayesian network from a Bean Machine model written in Python. ericlippert.com/2022/12/07/b…

Bean Machine Retrospective, part 3

Introducing Beanstalk Last time I introduced Bean Machine Graph, a second implementation of the PPL team’s Bayesian inference algorithm. We can compare and contrast the two implementations: B…

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Today on FAIC: introducing Bean Machine Graph, which trades a "mechanism domain" API and a restricted set of data shapes and operators for improved inference performance over Bean Machine proper. ericlippert.com/2022/12/05/b…

Bean Machine Retrospective, part 2

Introducing Bean Machine Graph Bean Machine has many nice properties: It is integrated with Python, a language often used by data scientists It describes models using the rich, flexible pytorch lib…

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Today on FAIC: A quick recap of the Bean Machine probabilistic programming language. Next week we'll start looking at the compiler. ericlippert.com/2022/12/02/b…

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I was briefly on loan to JMW's team a few years ago; happy to see that this work is getting much deserved recognition. It is an interesting and hard problem to solve at FB scale!
John Myles White@johnmyleswhite
30 Nov 2022
One of the teams I support at Meta is focused on improving the experience of using SQL at Meta. We've just published a blog post about some of our work: engineering.fb.com/2022/11/3…
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Today on FAIC: some thoughts on my last day at Meta; I'm starting a series describing my last couple years of work. ericlippert.com/2022/11/30/a…

A long expected update

It’s been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises. Apolog…

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My team at Meta -- which lowers costs and improves decision making of other teams -- has been disbanded as a cost cutting measure, part of the 11K employees laid off yesterday. I'm fine, and not looking for work right now. I am however very concerned for my team.
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I know it's a tough market out there but if anyone has leads on positions for smart data scientists with some compiler experience who solve hard problems at scale, please do reply here; thanks!
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I am installing Windows 11 right now and I immediately noticed a small but important improvement in the installation script. It now says "please keep your computer on". Previous updates said "do not turn off your computer". This is an improvement in two ways.
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First, it's simply more pleasant and polite to ask someone to do something instead of making a curt demand. Second, and even better, this now follows Eric's Rule Of Walking On Docks.
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When I'm walking on a slippery dock holding my keys I never tell myself (or others) "don't drop your keys". I always tell myself "hold on to your keys". Visualize the desired outcome, not the unwanted outcome!
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