I wrote a book!
It's called "Writing An Interpreter In Go" and contains what it says on the box.
In the book we will build a programming language from scratch. We'll start with 0 lines of code and end up with a fully working interpreter for the Monkey programming language. It's not a book about theory, its focus is working code.
Check it out at interpreterbook.com
Hi there! My name is Thorsten Ball. I'm a software developer living in Aschaffenburg, Germany, a small city near Frankfurt am Main.
I like to develop, optimize and take care of sophisticated systems. Or put another way: I like to program where the rubber hits the road -- wherever that may be.
At daytime, as a software developer at Deutsche Bahn, I work with a web stack: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, HTML and also CSS, but please don't ask me about floats! I also use Go and even shipped performance-increasing C code to production. And if you ask me how much I like PostgreSQL and SQL, I'll talk your ears off.
But before I leave for work, in the early morning hours, I love to deep dive into other programming topics that interest me: programming languages, interpreters, compilers, web servers, systems programming, Unix, databases. I'm a big fan of digging deep and peeling away at abstraction layers to get a better sense of what I'm working with. It also gives me much more leverage higher up. In short: I love learning new things.
Sometimes I write blog posts about these deep dives, which you can find here, or I give talks about what I found. And in 2016 I even wrote a book about what I learned when trying to build my own programming language.
Posts
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- 28 Jun 2017 The Lost Chapter: A Macro System For Monkey
- 22 Feb 2017 Writing An Interpreter In Go: The Paperback Edition
- 08 Feb 2017 Higher Value Tools
- 16 Jan 2017 What I didn't do to write a book
- 04 Jan 2017 A Virtual Brainfuck Machine In Go
- 30 Nov 2016 Why I Wrote a Book About Interpreters
- 16 Nov 2016 Putting Eval In Go
- 22 Oct 2015 Write Stupid Code
- 20 Nov 2014 Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks
- 13 Oct 2014 Why threads can't fork
- 13 Jun 2014 Where did fork go?
- 12 Mar 2014 Watching and Understanding the Ruby 2.1 Garbage Collector at Work
- 11 Aug 2013 Named Pipes
- 07 Apr 2013 Watchgopher
- 15 Jan 2013 Discipline
- 24 Oct 2012 Command Line Ride
- 02 Sep 2012 Software Cover Versions And Programming Licks
- 09 Jul 2012 Vim Learning Resources
- 20 Jun 2012 How I used 98840 commands less and saved 4 seconds
- 08 Jun 2012 Ordered Search Autocompletion With Redis
Talks
- 06 Apr 2017 Frankfurt Gophers Meetup A Virtual Brainfuck Machine In Go (Slides)
- 04 Nov 2015 Hochschule Trier Software Engineering at Flinc
- 13 Mar 2015 wroc_love.rb in Wroclaw, Poland Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (Slides)
- 11 Feb 2015 flinc Lunch-Talk in Darmstadt, Germany Introduction to Go (Slides)
- 02 Oct 2014 ArrrrCamp in Ghent, Belgium Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (Slides)
Podcasts
- 30 Jun 2017The Hanselminutes Podcast - YOU should write an interpreter with Thorsten Ball
- 23 Dec 2016Go Time #28 - Creating a Programming Language with Thorsten Ball
Projects
Applikatoni - A deployment server for small teams with multiple applications, written in Go, developed at flinc.
Fzz - Small command line tool that makes your command line interactive. Also see vim-fzz.
Watchgopher - A lightweight, scriptable and UNIX-y filewatcher.
dotfiles - My dotfiles. git, zsh, tmux, etc.
vimconfig - Everything that goes on in my ~/.vim folder.
Recreational Programming
Not finished, not stable, not ready for production, but fun!
Helles - A multi-process webserver written entirely in C.
Sceem - A small Lisp/Scheme interpreter written in Ruby.
Contact
Never hesitate to send me an email at me@thorstenball.com. I love getting email from you.
You can also find me on Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, XING and Facebook.
I also maintain a mailing list, on which I sent out occasional updates about my book or this blog. I won't spam you and you can unsubscribe at any time.