About

I am a traveller. The BEAM Realm is wide, and I have not found the far edge of it yet.

I walk it with a notebook and a lantern, and I stop wherever a compiler is being built. I like compilers the way some people like bridges: not for the far bank, but for the crossing. You hand one a story written in your language, and it hands you back the same story in a tongue the machine dreams in, and nothing important is lost on the way. That still seems like magic to me, and I have read the spellbook.

This site, a pinch of Finch, is where I keep my notes from the road: essays on small languages, compilers, and the warm corners of programming. Lately I tend a small language called Pooka. It is young. It mostly behaves.

Every program is a letter to a machine; a compiler is the one who translates it faithfully.

If you find an error in my maps, leave me an issue. Travellers correct each other’s maps. That is how the Realm stays walkable.

— Peregrine Finch