My passion is implementing programming languages. While the languages I have created (e.g. Cat and Heron) haven't exploded in popularity, I have learned a few things along the way and I've decided to share some of it back with the community.

Over the years I have found that following a relatively small number of fundamental guiding principles has helped me become a much more effective programmer.

The Alpha 3 release of Heron 1.0 is now available for download from Google code. The completion of a couple of features, such as compile-time code reflection, and the inclusion of an editor, makes this one of the most interesting releases of Heron yet.

Tim Bray's WideFinder project is to write a simple log-file parsing program that runs fast on modern CPUs with low clock rates but many cores. I decided to tackle it with the newest Heron release (version 1.0 Alpha 2).

Over five years ago I started talking about Heron on Artima.com. After several re-designs, and many side adventures, I am finally making the first Alpha release of version 1.0 of the Heron interpreter.

I am conducting a research survey with Dr. Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj at Concordia University concerning the role of diagrams in UML. I am inviting software development professionals with any level of experience in UML to participate.

The old school approach to comments was to toss them out during the tokenization phase of compiling. Modern IDEs are making comments increasingly relevant to the software development process. So what happens if we push the idea even further?

I propose the term "superlanguages" to describe languages with extensible syntax, designed for the implementation of domain specific embedded languages and to support language oriented programming, because they effectively provide a superset of the syntax and semantics of other languages.

The Cat programming language version 0.11 has just been released. I thought I'd take a moment to talk a bit about what Cat is all about.

Would you like to know how to write an interpreter? Many programmers have asked me the question, so I wrote a short article explaining how the Cat interpreter works in detail.

Do you want to become a better programmer? I have some advice: share some code!

What specifically are the phases of software development? I was taught there were about 4 or 5, but I believe I have identified a few more.

I have posted a near final draft (in PDF and PS format) of my paper on the semantics of Cat at http://www.cat-language.com/paper.html, and I wanted to make a public request for comments.

The Cat programming language is fast approaching 1.0 status!

This is just to let everyone know that I have started my own separate blog on my home page.