It’s been a couple of years since I posted here! Somehow 2014 turned into an opportunity for me to practice forms of expression other than programming, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I still spent lots of time on language design throughout 2014, and I’ve been zooming along in the new year.
Ethics for language design
I still dream big enough in my language design that ethics is an important consideration, but I’ve mellowed down when it comes to long-term ethics, and I’ve riled up a little about short-term ethics. :) Whatever happens, I think we’ll eventually build systems for better communication throughput between people, reducing the kind of violent pressure releases I was afraid of. After all, whatever organizations have better communication methods will probably become more intelligent as organizations, and they’ll outcompete the others. We just have to worry about how brutal that competition will be. So I figure we should foster egalitarianism in ways that cultivate competitive markets. Does that make me a left-libertarian? I don’t even know.
Pragmatics for language design
At this point I think of a programming language as something that has niche value. “Programming” is a rather nebulous term itself, and “language” describes the skill you use rather than the reward you get. As user interfaces go, programming languages are optimized for tasks where the user will have a) a long time to prepare their input, b) a higher tolerance for complexity than for redundancy, and c) a rather strong commitment to their chosen code once it’s deployed out of their reach. Well-designed UIs avoid such high complexity and commitment burdens, so my expectation as a programming language designer is to put myself out of a hobby.
Between complexity and commitment, commitment is the more essential problem. Much of the complexity in programming can be traced back to commitment thresholds: Either the bit is set, or it’s clear, never in between. Furthermore I think it’s plausible to trace this back to the mind-body threshold: Human minds are so disconnected from each other that we insist on personal identity, and this insistence lends a sense of absolute discreteness to so many of the concepts we form. (Although I’m attributing this to humans, this might be more specifically a Western trend. My perspective is too myopic to tell.)
On the other hand, not all complex artifacts are deployed with a high commitment cost. Sometimes people deploy complex artifacts because they can’t help it, leaving behind fingerprints and memories. We might want to take advantage of this, focusing on programming languages that help us interpret found artifacts in a useful way.
If I’m on the right track here, then programs would do best to be shaped like some kind of fingerprint, and encapsulation boundaries in programming would do best to behave like the encapsulation boundaries of people. That way we’re not introducing unnecessary concepts. Well, people are vaguely like modules: Not only is a program module encapsulated in a way vaguely similar to a person, but orderless sets of interacting modules are vaguely similar to orderless sets of interacting people. When modules interact, their interaction membrane, if we took a fingerprint of it, would be their import/export type signature. Maybe a type signature is a fingerprint for person-to-person interaction too.
Based on this train of thought, we might like to find a language with only type signatures. If we took a typed functional language with implicits or type classes, removed everything but the type signatures, and tried to program with it anyway, we would accomplish some form of logic programming. Maybe logic programming languages are on to something.
Below the cut, I’ll list some of the language projects I’ve worked on over the past year or two. The above philosophical premises will be relevant for a few of them, but I won’t refrain from discussing tangential features and challenges I’m excited about. If you’d like to avoid most of the technical meat-fluff and get back to the philosophical fluff-meat, I recommend skipping to the section titled “Era Tenerezza” and reading from there. :)
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