Functional-Programming on Unnamed Website

Haskelling My Typst

Anthony Wang — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:14:12 -0600

Typst is a typesetting system similar to LaTeX. It’s also a dynamically typed programming language with value semantics, so of course the natural question is: Can we implement the Haskell lazy infinite lists trick in Typst?

Typst doesn’t have a built-in lazy evaluation feature, but we can simulate thunks with lambdas. Basically, if we want to defer evaluating something, we’ll wrap it in a function that takes a dummy argument, and then call that function when we actually want to do the evaluation. The lists themselves will be represented as cons cells using Typst dictionaries. Here’s how to lazily map over a list:

RNG and Cosine in Nix

Anthony Wang — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 12:56:26 -0400

NixOS is an immutable, atomic Linux distribution with a declarative and reproducible configuration and packaging system using the purely functional, lazily evaluated, dynamically typed Nix programming language.

Kublai: AAAAAAHHH too many buzzwords, what does that all mean???

Glad you asked! Basically, in NixOS, you can configure your entire system using a configuration.nix file and NixOS will magically (using a bunch of Bash scripts) figure out what needs to be installed and how to do it. For instance, if you want to enable Firefox, you’d add programs.firefox.enable = true; to your configuration.nix. Easy as that.

Haskelling My Python

Anthony Wang — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:08:44 -0400

A few years ago, Pleng showed me a really cool trick you can do with lazy infinite lists in Haskell.

Kublai: Oh no, not Haskell! 😱

Don’t worry. There will be no mandatory Haskell in this post (although it is a really nice language which you should check out!). Instead, today Erik asked me if that trick also works using infinite Python generators, and turns out it does!