Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
24. Advances in programming languages reduce incidental complexity — the complexity of talking with machines that doesn’t relate to problems you’re trying to solve.
Big advances: garbage collection/not having to worry about memory management, performant immutable datastructures
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
25. Big ideas that shape whole languages have made their way into Clojure through libraries
The paper Communicating Sequential Processes inspired the creation of Golang (Go) — very popular at google.
In Clojure, core.async library gives you all that!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=drmNlZVkUeE…
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
26. Bret Victor is right about direct manipulation generally.
Specifically: CSS is a flaming pile of garbage.
Messing with margins and padding to try to get a layout to look the way you want is 100% incidental complexity.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
27. Just parroting his quote from above talk
“So much of creativity is discovery, and you can’t discover anything if you can’t see what you’re doing”
Similarly, programming languages should not only be conceived of as text or symbol based
see
http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
28. Getting beyond abstract symbols does not mean getting beyond abstract ideas.
The power of programming languages (and why you may want to learn them, even if not intent on building software) is that they let you get you hands dirty with building and using ur own abstractions.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
29. Cheating and linking an old thread
https://x.com/Conaw/status/1134173307878629376…
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
30. Datalog is a much better query language than SQL, and will be more widely used than SQL in 2050
But might be only if you count people using natural language datalog, which will go mainstream in next 10 years
https://web.archive.org/web/20181102114644/http://alexwarth.com/projects/nl-datalog/…
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
31. Urbit is an interesting project, but won’t actually take off unless/until someone writes an X → Hoon or X → Arvo or X → “whatever” compiler because no one actually wants to think in Yarvis’ pig latin.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
32. Hosted languages that provide nicer abstractions over the libraries from their host language have a huge huge advantage over new languages starting from scratch.
The ability to work with libraries from an existing/broader ecosystem is damn near table stakes for a new lang
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
33. The world is a worse place because MIT switched from teaching LISP in the intro CS courses to teaching Python.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
34. If you haven’t learned a programming language for a reason other than
A) It was a assigned to you in school
B) You thought it would make you money
Then I doubt your
a) curiosity
b) open-mindedness
and as a result
c) competency as a engineer