Brandon Wu

I like programming languages and musical theatre. On a mission to teach the world about functional programming. Program Analysis Engineer at @semgrep.

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

After a long coming, and many months of work behind the scenes, I have finally made my functional programming lectures from this summer at CMU available for free online. I truly hope it helps people.
https://t.co/KI6sulwx3K

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

@jo_cl06 I’m so glad! Comments like this give me the energy to hopefully one day resume making content :)

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

I rarely post nowadays, but I just wrote a blog post on my experiences teaching functional programming a few summers ago. I hope you find it meaningful. https://t.co/X36FC5W2xk

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

@_djpn @ChShersh Semgrep is currently hiring an OCaml engineer for static analysis: https://t.co/f4aKzxL4Ms

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

give me source code and I will move the world

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

@shwestrick @NYU_Courant Congratulations!

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

I’m proud to announce that 15-150 is now available on Semgrep Academy, along with a wealth of amazing security courses, all free for the public. Be sure to check it out to see all the amazing things Tanya has put together!

[Tanya Janca | Shehackspurple @shehackspurple]

Today is the launch of @Semgrep Academy! Free courses on #AppSec, Secure Coding, #API Security, Functional Programming, and MORE! Please go check it out here:
https://t.co/wwkpXzXxQL

[Semgrep @semgrep]

What started as an April Fools joke turned into a great demo of Semgrep’s extensibility and scalability when it comes to adding support for new languages.

Check out more about our GA support for CodeQL’s query language in @onefiftyman’s blog post:

https://t.co/jARqn6Qg8N

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

@Andevrs @yawaramin I wouldnt say this is true, I have almost exclusively been employed to write OCaml (even for my first job out of undergrad). The point is it could have been OCaml, it could have been Typescript, Python. People fixate far too much on the language when its skills that matter.

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

If I lose both my AirPods and get them replaced at the Apple Store, are they still “Brandon’s AirPods Pro”?

[Semgrep @semgrep]

💕 Happy Valentine’s Day from Semgrep! Here’s a peek at some of the Valentine’s created for our team by the talented Brandon Wu—great for some last minute inspo if you are scrambling for a card! #valentinesday #appsechumor

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

You can take me out of the classroom, but not the classroom out of me. Excited to share my first supplemental lecture for 150, on going from SML to OCaml!

https://t.co/DUGkHtkbTc

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

@Aron_Adler Nothing they said here seems to be Haskell-specific. You could say the same of OCaml or SML.

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

is it evil to want absolute power and influence if I only use it to teach functional programming

[aron @Aron_Adler]

I know I am far from the first person to say this, but I think it's clear the only reason people think FP is harder than imperative/OOP is because they encounter it later.
So they've just about managed to get their head around the horrors of memory management, mutable data types, class design/inheritance, field access modifiers, remembering which things can be null and which can't, etc etc etc, all using compilers that do the bare minimum to help you with any of this... and now you want to talk to them about a whole new paradigm that uses "mathematical principles" you say? nah bro pls i'm so exhausted

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

@mjambon it’s very annoying, prefix record access produces such ugly code in my opinion

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

It’s incredible how functional record updates and postfix access notation almost single-handedly make records usable in OCaml, over SML.

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

Usability matters!

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

LaTeX macros are not referentially transparent and it infuriates me

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

broke: `List.interleave : 'a list * 'b list -> ('a, 'b) either list`
woke:
```
datatype ('a, 'b) cycle = Nil | Cons of 'a * ('b, 'a) cycle
```
`List.interleave : 'a list * 'b list -> ('a, 'b) cycle`

[Brandon Wu @onefiftyman]

A fun example of opaque behavior due to a lack of referential transparency is in the Typescript type-checker -- if we have that `const x = a.b`, it is not true that `a.b` is interchangeable with `x`, in terms of producing a well-typed program, which is unintuitive.