Computer science, software engineering, math, and music. http://www.stephanboyer.com/ Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000 I wrote a ballad for tenor voice and piano featuring lyrics from William Blake's poem "Never Seek to Tell Thy Love." From a music theoretic perspective,... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/47/never-seek-to-tell-thy-love http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/47/never-seek-to-tell-thy-love Thu, 16 May 2013 01:38:39 +0000 I'm taking a music theory/composition class at MIT called Writing in Tonal Forms. One of our class projects was to write a minuet and trio for string... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/42/i-wrote-some-classical-music http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/42/i-wrote-some-classical-music Mon, 13 May 2013 01:47:34 +0000 Fluid and responsive layouts are becoming commonplace in modern web designs. It's important that web applications are usable on all kinds of devices,... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/41/fluid-and-responsive-grid-layouts http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/41/fluid-and-responsive-grid-layouts Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000 Subtyping can be a complicated topic, and it's a nightmare for the programming language designer. This is due in part to confusion about a pair of... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/39/covariance-and-contravariance http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/39/covariance-and-contravariance Mon, 06 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000 I sometimes use Python for quick-and-dirty computations. Its "batteries-included" standard library makes it convenient for all kinds of tasks. Python... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/38/counting-to-a-billion http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/38/counting-to-a-billion Sun, 05 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000 In my last post, I announced that I had started a new bastard pop _a cappella_ group at MIT called the Centrifugues. Last night we had our first annual... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/36/the-mit-centrifugues-fall-concert-2013 http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/36/the-mit-centrifugues-fall-concert-2013 Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000 For my last semester as an MIT undergraduate, I started a new bastard pop _a cappella_ group at MIT called the Centrifugues. After a semester of hard... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/33/the-debut-of-the-mit-centrifugues http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/33/the-debut-of-the-mit-centrifugues Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000 Sumin and I had a "call and response" piano improv battle today. http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/32/piano-dueling-with-sumin http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/32/piano-dueling-with-sumin Sun, 14 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0000 A ray tracer^1 is a program that renders a 3-D scene by firing virtual rays from the camera and computing their intersections with the objects in the... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/30/real-time-ray-tracing-in-javascript http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/30/real-time-ray-tracing-in-javascript Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:00:00 +0000 The software that powers this blog is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license. Of course, you are welcome to use it to serve your own... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/29/this-blog-is-open-source http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/29/this-blog-is-open-source Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:00:00 +0000 Singing some Mozart with Sumin over spring vacation! http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/28/ave-verum-corpus http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/28/ave-verum-corpus Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:00:00 +0000 For a class called 6.033 (Computer Systems Engineering) at MIT, I was required to design a collaborative, distributed text editor. It's supposed to work... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/26/3-way-text-merging-algorithm http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/26/3-way-text-merging-algorithm Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:00:00 +0000 This is my final undergraduate semester at MIT. Here's my schedule this term! 1. 6.UAR Super UROP Academic Component 2. Advanced Undergraduate... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/25/my-spring-2013-schedule http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/25/my-spring-2013-schedule Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:00:00 +0000 I just bought a new guitar, and I asked myself: **what is the highest note you can play on a guitar (in standard tuning?** When plucked, the high E... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/24/highest-note-on-a-guitar http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/24/highest-note-on-a-guitar Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:00:00 +0000 I wrote a lightweight, low-level ASCII/Unicode processing library in C++ out of dissatisfaction with existing solutions. Get it here! http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/23/unicode-library http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/23/unicode-library Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:00:00 +0000 Anyone who has taken a class on computability theory, compilers, or finite automata knows that regular expressions can be parsed in linear time by... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/22/deterministic-and-nondeterministic-finite-automata http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/22/deterministic-and-nondeterministic-finite-automata Sun, 28 Oct 2012 12:00:00 +0000 I'm a senior at MIT. Here's my schedule this term! 1. 6.UAR Super UROP Academic Component 2. Advanced Undergraduate Research Program 3. 6.170... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/20/my-fall-2012-schedule http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/20/my-fall-2012-schedule Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:00:00 +0000 A type system starts with some primitive types. Some examples include: - `Int` (the type of integers, perhaps limited to some range) - `Real` (the... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/18/algebraic-data-types http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/18/algebraic-data-types Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000 I recently built a partially self-balancing electric unicycle called "Bullet," featuring: - A custom MIG-welded steel chassis - A 450 Watt electric... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/17/my-electric-unicycle http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/17/my-electric-unicycle Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000 In the last post, we learned about monads and how to use them to implement exception handling, vector operations, and debug output. To refresh your... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/10/monads-part-2-a-data-structure-for-computation http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/10/monads-part-2-a-data-structure-for-computation Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000 In the last two posts, we saw how we can describe side effects in a pure functional programming language with a combination of universe tokens (passing... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/9/monads-part-1-a-design-pattern http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/9/monads-part-1-a-design-pattern Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000 Last time we saw how we can, in practice, achieve side effects in a functional programming language without sacrificing purity. It seems like a paradox... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/8/uniqueness-types http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/8/uniqueness-types Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000 Today we'll examine why functional languages have a reputation of being a mere novelty of academia, while imperative languages have dominated the... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/7/side-effects-and-functional-programming http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/7/side-effects-and-functional-programming Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000 I'd like to make the content of this blog as accessible as possible to the general computer science community. To start off, I think it would be a good... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/6/the-great-war http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/6/the-great-war Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000 I recently became obsessed with declarative programming, and functional programming in particular. Languages such as Haskell, Erlang, Miranda, and... http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/5/welcome http://www.stephanboyer.com/post/5/welcome Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000