4 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
    1. REPLs are nice but they work well only for reasonably isolated code with few dependencies. It's hard to set up a complex object to pass into a function. It's harder still to set up an elaborate context of dependencies around that function.

      I wonder how much of this is accomplishable by automatically parameterizing code by the types that aren't used internally so they implementation can forget about the specifics. In addition some sort of meta-programming capability to automatically generate arbitrary instances or a richer form of trace types for user types would go a long way to simplifying the trace generation.

  2. Sep 2022
    1. Now, not every programmer prefers that kind of development. Some programmers prefer to think of development as a process of designing, planning, making blueprints, and assembling parts on a workbench. There’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed, a multibillion-dollar international industry has been built upon it.

      I still think they should worry about it. Production systems need to evolve and contain data; reasoning about the systems completely statically from the source code with no regard to the existing data is a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

    2. In fact, there’s a style of programming, well known in Lisp and Smalltalk circles, in which you define a toplevel function with calls to other functions that don’t yet exist, and then define those functions as you go in the resulting breakloops. It’s a fast way to implement a procedure when you already know how it should work.
    3. Moreover, because the entire language and development system are available, unrestricted, in the repl, you can define the missing function bar, resume foo, and get a sensible result.

      This seems like one of the key points. The ability to edit computations while running. Type holes with resuming gets you most of the way there but there's probably also modifications. I wonder how you can keep it from getting confusing. Something similar to FRP?