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rntz's blog
Personal blog · rntz.net · on HN as rntzprogrammingphilosophy
rntz's blog is a personal blog at rntz.net about programming and philosophy. Since 2014, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Simple, pure, and total functional language that generalizes Datalog”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Simple, pure, and total functional language that generalizes Datalog4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-12-09
- Evaluation order and nontermination in query languages3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-06-20
- Against software development3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-11-09
- Datafun – functional language that generalizes Datalog3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-14
- Deconstructing Datalog2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-12
- Datafun: A Functional Datalog [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-23
- Not Everything is an Expression (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-20
- Deconstructing Datalog [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-15
- Aphorisms on programming language design (2017)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-27
What Hacker News says?
I use markdown for writing blog posts, and I need arbitrary HTML all the time . For tables; or for custom syntax highlighting; for drop-down menus that let readers choose what PL they want to see examples in ( http://www.rntz.net/post/2016-06-06-not-everything-is-an-exp... ); to put the numbers on section headings into the left-margin; etc, etc. Basically, markdown has (at least) two use-cases: 1. A safe (if you do…
Comment linking /post/2016-06-06-not-everything-is-an-expression.html
on “Mdmath – LaTeX Math for Markdown inside of Visual Studio Code”Submitted Against software development as a story · 244 points
HN discussionYes, for some kinds of operations on some kinds of data structures. The keyword/property is "monotonicity". Monotonic functions are guaranteed to terminate under fixed-point semantics. Look into Datafun: A total functional language that generalizes Datalog. Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk. https://www.rntz.net/datafun/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC295d3V9gE
Comment linking /datafun/
on “Implementing Logic Programming”Submitted Simple, pure, and total functional language that generalizes Datalog as a story · 90 points
HN discussionEvery programmers should know something about memory, because software are becoming bloat [1] [2] because of a new generation of programmers who doesn't optimize their code. So, of course, you had a wonderful career, but it doesn't prove that you write efficient code [1] http://www.rntz.net/post/against-software-development.html [2] http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
Comment linking /post/against-software-development.html
on “What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (2007) [pdf]”Submitted Option and Null in Dynamic Languages as a story · 37 points
HN discussionI agree, the database angle is fascinating! There's an interesting CSTheory.SE answer here [1] with some pointers to further reading, written by one of the creators of the Datafun [2] query language. [1] https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/38221/is-there-... [2] http://www.rntz.net/datafun/
Comment linking /datafun/
on “Category Theory: Orders”Submitted Aphorisms on programming language design (2017) as a story · 36 points
HN discussionA decidable variant called Datalog is becoming popular thanks in part to Clojure and Datomic / Datascript. See also Flix and Datafun. [1] http://www.learndatalogtoday.org/ [2] https://flix.dev/ [3] http://www.rntz.net/datafun/
Comment linking /datafun/
on “Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)”Submitted Not Everything is an Expression (2016) as a story · 25 points
HN discussionIn my mind, there are three really great little languages: * datafun - attempt to extend datalog to more generic computation. http://www.rntz.net/datafun/ I liked simillar exploration of computing with latices with the concept of propagators: http://web.mit.edu/~axch/www/art.pdf * dhall - configuration language that has user defined functions, but is total :) https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang * the gamma - a…
Comment linking /datafun/
on “Little Languages”Submitted Intuitive hygienic macros (2009) as a story · 22 points
HN discussionLocation: Oxford, UK Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes (NB. I am both a US & a UK citizen, so no visa issues w/ moving to US.) Technologies: I design, implement, and improve programming languages. Do you have a problem that could benefit from its own programming language? Are you using a language that you wish had some feature, but doesn't? Talk to me. Systems programming (kernels, GCs, JIT compilers) is another…
Comment linking /resume.html
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2017)”Submitted Deconstructing Datalog [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA really cool prject in that space is/was datafun. http://www.rntz.net/datafun/ Roughly: the way facts work in Datalog and similar stuff have pretty strong monotonicity properties. So if you want to allow adding more predicates and computations to the system, you kinda wanna only allow monotonic functions! This has some pretty interesting surprises when it comes to how to model things like true or false!
Comment linking /datafun/
on “Formulog: ML + Datalog + SMT”Submitted Why I am not a fan of Cabal or Stack as a story · 3 points
HN discussion(Not who you are replying to) Not sure if it’s specifically related to DBSP but checkout incremental DataFun (slide ~55 of https://www.rntz.net/files/stl2017-datafun-slides.pdf ) and the paper cited there: A Theory of Changes for Higher Order Languages: Incrementalizing Lambda-calculi by Static Differentiation (Cai et. al, PLDI 2014).
Comment linking /files/stl2017-datafun-slides.pdf
on “Streaming joins are hard”Submitted Evaluation order and nontermination in query languages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've just published a draft paper on an entirely different approach to the same problem: instead of creating a higher-order Prolog, we've discovered a functional (and so higher-order) analogue of Datalog, a more limited language ( http://www.rntz.net/files/datafun.pdf , on github at https://www.github.com/rntz/datafun ) This idea of a higher-order Prolog is very interesting! But it's not clear to me how it can be tr…
Comment linking /files/datafun.pdf
on “Extensional Higher Order Prolog”Submitted Evaluation order and nontermination in query languages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI published it on 2009-03-03. Dates are listed at http://www.rntz.net/index.html but not in the articles themselves; I guess maybe I should fix that (not sure where a good place to put the date would be). I don't feel that separate function/value namespaces really solves the problem of hygiene. It just makes it less likely to come up in practice. It's an 80% solution: pragmatic but unsatisfying.
Comment linking /index.html
on “Intuitive hygienic macros (2009)”Submitted Deconstructing Datalog as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe other recent research that's been interesting to watch has been in logic programming (Prolog and Datalog), where there's been a lot of papers extending Datalog with semilattice types that are more efficient for computing dataflow-type queries (and even getting lattice types added to Souffle recently), including papers like datafun[0] extending it to sound incremental queries for more efficient execution - and th…
Comment linking /files/seminaive-datafun.pdf
on “Ask HN: What is new in Algorithms / Data Structures these days?”Submitted Deconstructing Datalog as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Datafun – functional language that generalizes Datalog as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deconstructing Datalog [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Datafun: A Functional Datalog [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Semilattices and their tensor products as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Aphorisms on programming language design as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Evaluation order and nontermination in query languages as a story · 1 points
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