• Books
  • Reviews
  • Programming Languages
    • Ada
    • C
    • Cobol
    • C++
    • C#
    • Eiffel
    • Fortran
    • Haskell
    • Java
    • JavaScript
    • Lisp
    • ML
    • Objective-C
    • Ocaml
    • Perl
    • Prolog
    • Python
    • Ruby
    • Scheme
    • Smalltalk
    • SQL
    • XSLT
• Code
  • Jython
  • JavaScript

Welcome

Welcome to the home of minimal programming. This site is devoted to the search for the most expressive ways to write computer programs (see vision).

As a starting point, I have collected information about a number of programming languages (from Fortran to Haskell to C#). You can find the descriptions of these languages with plenty of examples in the draft a book.

I also use this site as a library for some code examples. For now, the code samples include some neat JavaScript tricks (I've realized the power of JavaScript only recently) and Jython (together with Eclipse's SWT).

These pages try to use (X)HTML and CSS effectively. For those who you would like to know more, I'll explain the different design elements and the (XSLT) template mechanism used to create these pages.

As an example consider the state of web design. The typical HTML code with nested tables, spacer images, and embedded layout attributes is far too complex for what it tries to achieve. Yes, there are tools to generate the HTML code, but complex tools for simple tasks often indicate that the original approach was misleading. In case of HTML, the solution is simple: use web standards such as XHTML/CSS and you will obtain clean HTML code with well separated layout in stylesheets, both easy to read and maintain (even manually).