8th June 2008
There was a time when you could whip out a parser in lex and yacc, stitch together a naive VM and throw it over the wall and you'd have a new scripting language. Those days are coming to a close and in a few years (if not months) you won't be able get traction with anything unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc.
Recent articles
- GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52 - 17th March 2026
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026