My Research

There are many things that I'm interested in; maybe too many things.

Programming Blog

I have a programming blog: Wouldn't You Believe It's Just My Luck. I rant and rave about a variety of issues on this site.

Programming Languages

My primary area of interest is programming languages: how languages are put together, what makes an effective language, how can the languages work better (for various definitions of "better").

Agile Software Development

Over the last few years I have become more and more interested in XP (Extreme Programming) and Agile Software Development in general. I find there's a lot of overlap with Agile Software Development and PL; I also find that studying software development gives me lots of excuses to write actual software (my true first love).

Practical Software

Well, it's practical if you need it...

Presently, I have two projects hosted at SourceForge:

No Latte is an interpreter for writing HTML documents as programs. It removes a lot of the tedious work of writing HTML, not unlike other scripting languages like PHP, Perl, and Ruby.
The ANTLR Testing Library is a Java library for testing code generated from grammars by ANTLR. This arose from my work on No Latte and from teaching the compiler and programming-languages courses here at Calvin.

During Summer 2007, I will be working on two Ruby on Rails projects.

The first is a new website for the CS Department.
The second is a simulation of fruit-fly experiments for the biology courses taught at Calvin.

Armchair Research

I've also done a few one-off research projects which I call "armchair research"---research you could do sitting in a relaxing armchair (not unlike an "armchair quarterback").