What Greg Wilson Writes About on The Third Bit

Greg Wilson's recent writing on third-bit.com splits into two streams: a dated series of posts about a small programming language called Frml, and a set of short, practical papers on software design, technical writing, and working safely online. If you want to follow the posts as they appear, the site points readers to Mastodon or to a full archive of past entries.

Recent posts: the Frml language series

The most recent posts, dated October 2026, walk through Frml one feature at a time. The sequence shown on the site runs:

Read in order, these read as a build log for a teaching language: arrays and loops first, then built-in functions, then contracts as a way to state what a function expects and promises, and finally a forward-looking "Next Steps" entry. The site offers two ways to keep up — read them all in the archive, or follow Wilson on Mastodon.

Recent papers: short, checklist-style advice

The papers listed are mostly "ten rules" or "quick tips" pieces, a format Wilson returns to often. They are useful as checklists rather than as research reading:

• 2024 — Experience Report: It Will Never Work in Theory. A report on the project of the same name, which Wilson co-founded to connect software engineering research with working programmers.
• 2023 — Ten simple rules for writing a technical book. Aimed at anyone considering a book-length technical project.
• 2022 — Twelve quick tips for software design. Design advice for people who write code, not just architects.
• 2021 — Ten quick tips for staying safe online. General online-safety guidance.
• 2020 — Ten quick tips for making things findable. About discoverability — of data, tools, or writing.

The full list of publications is linked from the site if you want the complete record.

Books, for context

The posts and papers sit alongside a substantial book list. Recent titles include Software Design by Example in Python (2024) and Software Design by Example in JavaScript (2022), both built around worked examples that reconstruct the tools programmers use daily. Earlier books cover research software engineering with Python (2021), JavaScript for data science (2020), and evidence-based teaching in Teaching Tech Together (2019). Wilson is listed as author, co-author, or editor of 14 programming books plus two for children.

Workshops, if you want the material live

The site also lists one-day workshops Wilson will run in person or online on request, by email. Topics include organizational change for researchers, winding down research and software projects, teaching practices for programmers and data scientists, telling good AI studies from bad ones, and managing research software teams. A rider with details is linked from the page.

How to use this

If you want to learn how a small language gets designed piece by piece, start with the Frml posts in date order. If you want advice you can apply this week, the "ten rules" papers are short enough to read in one sitting — the software design and technical book ones are the most directly actionable. And if you'd rather have Wilson teach the material, the workshop list is the entry point.