RAGANWALD.COM - Reginald Braithwaite

Welcome to my humble abode on the World Wide Web!

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Essays	New Yorker Cartoon, c. 2025 Cryptographic techniques used by nCrypt Light in 1994 Mutual Recursion in Language The Inner Osborne Effect

Thanks for posting this, great stuff...
—Mark Watson

Wow! Thank you so much for taking the time to write and for sharing it :) Will have to read a few more times before it properly sinks in I think! Really thorough and well written! —Johnathan Mukai

2015 - 2019

books	JavaScript Allongé (pdf, podcast) is as close to capturing the true soul of JavaScript as anything I’ve read. The examples are very well thought out, and the writing style is a joy to read.—acjohnson55 This book is awesome and blowing my mind in a great way.”—Johnathan Mukai The best discussion of functional programming in js I’ve found so far.—Nicholas Faiz I think it’s one of the best tech books I’ve read since Sedgewick’s Algorithms in C.—Andrey Sidorov
talks	Optimism and the Growth Mindset from NDC Conferences Optimism II from DevDay Optimism from Nordic Ruby JavaScript Combinators from DevDay JavaScript Combinators, The Six Edition from NDC Conferences First-Class Commands: An unexpectedly fertile design pattern from NDC Conferences
essays	Exploring Regular Expressions, Part II: Regular Languages and Finite-State Automata Exploring Regular Expressions and Finite-State Recognizers, Part I A Brutal Look at Balanced Parentheses, Computing Machines, and Pushdown Automata is amazingly well written. You covered a good deal of any introduction to computational theory course in a straightforward, well motivated matter. This is definitely something I’ll be passing around to some of my bootcamp friends who are curious taste some of the theory they don’t get exposure to.—kjeetgil Ayoayo and Linear Recursion Structural Sharing and Copy-on-Write Semantics, Part II: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle Exploring Structural Sharing and Copy-on-Write Semantics, Part I Alice and Bobbie and Sharleen and Dyck Pattern Matching and Recursion Ruby's Hashes and Perl's Autovivification, in JavaScript Why Y? Deriving the Y Combinator in JavaScript sounds like poetry. Beautifully written!—nikodunk To Grok a Mockingbird The Eight Queens Problem... and Raganwald's Unexpected Nostalgia A Trick of the Tail Recursion? We don't need no stinking recursion! More State Machine ❤️: From Reflection to Statecharts How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ❤️ the State Machine I’ve been looking for a resource to introduce state machines to others. This does much more. Thank you—Pyrolistical Truncatable Primes in JavaScript Closing Iterables is a Leaky Abstraction A Sequence Problem What's a Transducer? Having our cake and eating it too: "Using iterators to write highly composeable code" foldl, foldr, and associative order Turing Machines and Tooling, Part I The Lumberjane Song Time, Space, and Life As We Know It I really enjoyed Why Recursive Data Structures? because it introduced me to a new data structure and some very elegant and (subjectively) beautiful algorithms.—johnfn From Higher-Order Functions to Libraries And Frameworks Anamorphisms in JavaScript From Mixins to Object Composition Why Are Mixins Considered Harmful? The Hubris of Impatient Sieves of Eratosthenes “We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris” “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” First-Class Commands (the annotated presentation) This is not an essay about 'Traits in Javascript' (updated) JavaScript Mixins, Subclass Factories, and Method Advices super() considered hmmm-ful An ES6 function to compute the nth Fibonacci number Solving a Coding Problem with Iterators and Generators Getters, Setters, and Organizing Responsibility in JavaScript Extension Methods, Monkey-Patching, and the Bind Operator Method Advice in Modern JavaScript Method Decorators in ECMAScript 2015 (and beyond) Using ES.later Decorators as Mixins Purely Functional Composition Functional Mixins in ECMAScript 2015 Prototypes are Objects (and why that matters) Classes are Expressions (and why that matters) De Stijl: How necessary are var, let, and const? OOP, JavaScript, and so-called Classes Carnac the Magnificent Hilbert's Grand JavaScript School (2015 Edition) Left-Variadic Functions in JavaScript Partial Application in ECMAScript 2015 The Symmetry of JavaScript Functions (revised) (unlikely to be) The Last Word on Interviewing for a JavaScript Job Interviewing for a JavaScript Job Lazy Iterables in JavaScript The Quantum Electrodynamics of Functional JavaScript Tail Calls, Default Arguments, and Excessive Recycling in ES-6 Destructuring and Recursion in ES-6

2010 - 2014

code	HashLife in the Browser, computing qudrillions of generations of Conway’s Game of Life in a browser. allong.es, a library for writing ES5 in a functional style. oscin.es, a library for playing with combinatorial logic puzzles such as those found in To Mock a Mockingbird
books	JavaScript Allongé (ES5) (podcast) CoffeeScript Ristretto (pdf)
talks	Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity from Nordic JS. Javascript Combinators from NDC Conferences The Art of the Javascript Metaobject Protocol from NDC Conferences The Art of the Javascript Metaobject Protocol from Nordic JS. Invent the future, don’t recreate the past from Future JS The Not-So-Big Software Design from wroc_love.rb.
	I have a good feeling about this - Why tooling is poised to make the jump to hyperspace from Web Rebels The Rebellion Imperative from Øredev

Essays

Why Why Functional Programming Matters Matters	Fun with Named Functions in JavaScript
600 Months	Chickens And Pigs
I Can't Find Good Salespeople	A JavaScript Constructor Problem, and Three Solutions

Greenspunning Predicate and Multiple Dispatch in JavaScript	Structs and ImmutableStructs
Repost: Captain Obvious on JavaScript	How to Trick the Gullible into Learning a New Programming Language
JavaScript Values Algebra	Mixins, Forwarding, and Delegation in JavaScript

Class Hierarchies? Don't Do That!	Future JS
Writing OOP using OOP	A Programmer's Story
At home with the Bumblethwaites	Private Methods In Ruby

Prototypes Are Not Classes	The New JavaScript Problem
Type-Fu Fighting	Defactoring
The Predicate Module Pattern	Leaky Greenspunned Abstractions

I hated, hated, hated this CoffeeScript	It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Scoping in CoffeeScript and JavaScript
Yes, JavaScript is a Lisp	Unfinished Work #1: Bind-by-Contract
Happy Birthday To Me	Functional's Greatest Accomplishment

Inelegance	config \|\|= config
Did you ever take that test yourself?	When FP? And when OOP?
Explicit vs. Clever	High Level Trampolining

Trampolines in JavaScript	My Literate CoffeeScript Blogging Workflow
The Interview	Zee Hackenbush Bird
Arity and Partial Function Application	Six Questions

Counting Crows (diversion)	A Surreal Encounter with a Winged Elephant
A long time ago, in a village far, far away	What's the difference between Currying and Partial Application?
Two Brief Points About CoffeeScript 1.5	Implementing the Sieve of Eratosthenes with Functional Programming

Hilbert's School Closed for Discriminatory Practices	Hilbert's Grand JavaScript School
Twenty Thirteen	Solving the "Drunken Walk" problem with iterators
The "Drunken Walk" Programming Problem	Tortoises, Teleporting Turtles, and Iterators (CoffeeScript)

Tortoises, Teleporting Turtles, and Iterators (JavaScript)	Classes vs. Prototypes in JavaScript
Practical Applications of Partial Application	Effective JavaScript Reviewed
Function and Method Decorators	The Madness of King JavaScript

More than you ever wanted to know about "this" in JavaScript, Part I	More Combinator Recipes in JavaScript: Partial, Bound, Send and Fluent
Combinator Recipes for Working With Objects in JavaScript	Duck Programming
While one of the main points of the article seems to be "duck programming is bad because it circumvents proper workflows", I suspect you could also reverse it and say "people write duck programs to avoid terrible workflows"—overgard

Williams, Master of the COMEFROM	Software's Receding Hairline

Selected early work

code	andand, the Maybe monad in idiomatic Ruby JQuery Combinators, composition-oriented tooling based on combinatory logic You Are ‘Da Chef, aspect-oriented programming tooling for Underscore projects rewrite_rails, add syntactic abstractions like andand and String-to-Block to Rails projects without monkey-patching ick, an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Monads, written in ES5 String#to_proc, a port of the String Lambdas from Oliver Steele’s Functional Javascript library nCrypt Light, “strong” encryption for the origial Apple Newton in 1994
books	What I’ve Learned From Failure
talks	Beautiful Failure from CUSEC

divider Bullshit from Unspace Interactive

essays

Elegance and the Surreals
A program to compute the nth Fibonacci number
The Mouse Trap

A+ story. Can't believe how much this stuff happens.—Xichekolas

Billy Martin's Management Secret, a Play in Three Acts

We Have Lost Control Of The Apparatus