Luis Thiam-Nye

with a silent 's'

One of my greatest sources of satisfaction is building something interesting and seeing it work. Introduced to a world of stunning feats of engineering, I developed a strong interest in computers and technology, particularly computer programming — a magic that allows you to turn imagination into some form of reality.

I enjoy creating systems and software to make processes more efficient. Software should serve the human, not the machine. Nowadays, I'm preoccupied with the crisis of modern computer software; most software continues to degenerate into slow, unusable, and dangerous tangles of complexity.

Current Status

  • Hobby: Software development mainly in Jai, attempting to make the state of software less disasterous.
  • Occupation: Undergraduate student of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
  • Location: England, United Kingdom.

What I Think

I like to ponder a variety of things, such as (1) how civilisation is falling rapidly and (2) what can be done to fix that.

For example, what is going on with software development? Why is so much software so slow, bloated and broken?

Anyone in their sane mind would make efforts to transition to techniques that have not been tugged up from the depths of Satan's lair. But no. Instead, there has been a trend towards ludicrous ideas, such as the overreaching usage of web technology (which is evident with the proliferation of Electron.js and React Native).

Optimisation is useless when you aren't optimising the right things. For instance, Google V8 ia an impressive creation, but it's a lot of engineering effort sunk into solving a problem that shouldn't exist; a better version of Javascript can only take us so far. What we desparately need is a radically different alternative set of technology and protocols that comes from a world that makes sense — a world that obeys reasonable expectations.

HTML/JavaScript has the wonderful property of being portable between platforms. While it is good that something like that exists, the thought that HTML/JS is the best solution for cross-platform user interfaces is a depressing thought. There are better ways.

Luckily, there are people willing to work at the low level to build things from scratch, better. The Jai programming language is a systems language with exceptionally good design. Hopefully, this will be a vital tool for restoring order and quality to the software landscape.

In the past, I was a heavy user of the Clojure programming language. It is a very interesting language that makes certain activities particularly convenient (e.g. data notation and manipulation) and dynamic code execution and introspection can be incredibly handy. My most interesting example of levering Clojure's features comes from a robotics project where I was able to easily alter and fine-tune the robot's program running remotely on a laptop.

To contact me, there is some information on the contact page.

Last updated: 2025-03-30