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Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

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Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#111

Post by gnocchi »

rntz wrote: post #19

Sean McDirmid's work on Glitch is an interesting (and distinctly contra- the current "FP all the things!" zeitgeist) approach to live programming: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/ Conal Elliott's work on Tangible FP was an interesting attempt to unify functional and "visual" programming that has been mostly abandoned: http://conal.net/papers/Eros/ Hopefully some of its ideas may yet survive in othe…

Thanks for Datafun where can I start to learn more about the syntax you are using on the README.md?

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#112

Post by jononor »

sklogic wrote: post #83

My research is on hierarchies of composable domain-specific languages (see github, account 'combinatorylogic').

If you want people to go there, provide a link https://github.com/combinatorylogic?tab=repositories #internetageattentionspan

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#113

Post by mej10 »

tolmasky wrote: post #48

We're working on http://tonicdev.com . You can read a bit about it here http://blog.tonicdev.com/2015/09/10/time-traveling-in-node.j... or just try it yourself. Some guiding principles: 1. So much of what hinders programmers is that the friction to using existing solutions is so high that they choose to redo the work themselves. In Tonic we've made every package for javascript immediately available (over 200,000), so…

How are you handling sandboxing and other security/abuse related things?

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#114

Post by nickpsecurity »

protomyth wrote: post #100
nickpsecurity wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do that back when I was investigating and toying with AI. Had a whole book dedicated to all the ways one could apply it. One use case was to send an agent over our slow, expensive connections to where the data was to do work for a price and bring just the results back. Since then, our connections and machines have gotten fast . Yet, HN posts show the concept lives on in cloud services doing datamining and s…

Weirdly, I'm not as interested in the AI aspect or the mobile code aspect[1]. I'm much more interested in a organization and modularization of system sense. I think it has an obvious code parallelism and a communication aspect for business users. 1) well, in the traditional Telescript sense. I am a bit interested for load balancing and redundancy.

That morphed into application and OS containers. Basically. They're way better than anything agent-oriented programming had back in the day. Also more versatile. That's why you don't hear about them for that much anymore except fringe academia.

Might have been different if Cyc or OpenMind had achieved anything. They could be the reference point for autonomous, mobile agents using knowledge-based programming. Best just to create more high-level languages, good libraries, and ways to package them up. It's not just good enough: it's more predictable and reliable than agent or expert systems even on their intended use-cases. Funny how that worked out, eh?

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#115

Post by rntz »

gnocchi wrote: post #111
rntz wrote: post #19

Sean McDirmid's work on Glitch is an interesting (and distinctly contra- the current "FP all the things!" zeitgeist) approach to live programming: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/ Conal Elliott's work on Tangible FP was an interesting attempt to unify functional and "visual" programming that has been mostly abandoned: http://conal.net/papers/Eros/ Hopefully some of its ideas may yet survive in othe…

Thanks for Datafun where can I start to learn more about the syntax you are using on the README.md?

Hm, which bits of syntax are you confused by in particular?

At the beginning, when defining what types, expressions, contexts, etc. looks like. I use a bunch of BNF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form). I'm afraid I don't actually know a good introduction to BNF.

The clearest account I know of of the most critical part of my notation, namely inference rules (those things with the big horizontal bars), is in Frank Pfenning's notes for his course on Constructive Logic: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/15317-f09/lectures/02-natd... (the full course of notes is at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/15317-f09/schedule.html, but the one I've linked is most relevant)

A lot of the rest of my notation (types like A × B, A → B, expressions like λx.e, the judgment Δ;Γ ⊢ e : A meaning "e has type A in context Δ;Γ", and the inference rules themselves) is borrowed from fairly standard type-theory-of-functional-languages stuff. Standard books to read here are Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin Pierce (https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/); or Practical Foundations for Programming Languages by Bob Harper (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/plbook/book.pdf). Those are pretty heavy books that cover a lot of ground, including stuff that's mostly irrelevant to my work. If you're interested, though, they're a great place to start learning about formal PL theory!

Was there anything else in particular you wanted to know about?

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#116

Post by protomyth »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #114
protomyth wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly, I'm not as interested in the AI aspect or the mobile code aspect[1]. I'm much more interested in a organization and modularization of system sense. I think it has an obvious code parallelism and a communication aspect for business users. 1) well, in the traditional Telescript sense. I am a bit interested for load balancing and redundancy.

That morphed into application and OS containers. Basically. They're way better than anything agent-oriented programming had back in the day. Also more versatile. That's why you don't hear about them for that much anymore except fringe academia. Might have been different if Cyc or OpenMind had achieved anything. They could be the reference point for autonomous, mobile agents using knowledge-based programming. Best jus…

> That morphed into application and OS containers. Basically. They're way better than anything agent-oriented programming had back in the day. Also more versatile. That's why you don't hear about them for that much anymore except fringe academia.

The applications and stuff that goes into containers has to be written in some language, and I think an agent oriented language might be more suitable for large programs than what we currently have. I really don't think they are better, just more in line with what we have now.

As I said, I'm not really interested in the expert system aspect (AI). I'm looking at this as a language issue to build big systems. I think containers are not a language answer but a coping mechanism for current languages and practices. I've been doing research on a different path. I hope others are looking beyond what we have now and what paths history didn't take because C and UNIX won.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#117

Post by sklogic »

jononor wrote: post #112
sklogic wrote: post #83

My research is on hierarchies of composable domain-specific languages (see github, account 'combinatorylogic').

If you want people to go there, provide a link https://github.com/combinatorylogic?tab=repositories #internetageattentionspan

I do not want to spam with links to my projects (and to get banned for this), but sometimes it is relevant to mention them, as in this thread.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#118

Post by gnocchi »

rntz wrote: post #115
gnocchi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for Datafun where can I start to learn more about the syntax you are using on the README.md?

Hm, which bits of syntax are you confused by in particular? At the beginning, when defining what types, expressions, contexts, etc. looks like. I use a bunch of BNF ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form ). I'm afraid I don't actually know a good introduction to BNF. The clearest account I know of of the most critical part of my notation, namely inference rules (those things with the big horizontal…

Thank you, this is perfect to get started, I've been programming for a long time and I couldn't extract enough meaning.

I've heard about the BNF notation with the recent news about Peter Naur death and before but never took to time to get my head around.

I think your description of Datafun and the references you gave me are good and enough to make me learn something new and to understand your project.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#119

Post by nickpsecurity »

protomyth wrote: post #116
nickpsecurity wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That morphed into application and OS containers. Basically. They're way better than anything agent-oriented programming had back in the day. Also more versatile. That's why you don't hear about them for that much anymore except fringe academia. Might have been different if Cyc or OpenMind had achieved anything. They could be the reference point for autonomous, mobile agents using knowledge-based programming. Best jus…

> That morphed into application and OS containers. Basically. They're way better than anything agent-oriented programming had back in the day. Also more versatile. That's why you don't hear about them for that much anymore except fringe academia. The applications and stuff that goes into containers has to be written in some language, and I think an agent oriented language might be more suitable for large programs tha…

Most of what it takes to do that were just some interpreters and function calls. Originally established in distributed computing like Amoeba, MPP systems, and Obliq in agent-oriented systems. Might help if you think on it looking at distributed, agent, and reactive languages to see what language aspects you think would make it easier. Then you'll be able to convey it better.

To me, it's just a VM (or source), ability to capture state, and one or more function calls. Any language could do this.

Obliq just in case you didn't know about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obliq

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#120

Post by dukoid »

jonathanedwards wrote: post #101

Wow, these comments mentions lots of work I wasn't aware of! We've been building a community of people working in this area: the Future Programming Workshop. http://www.future-programming.org/ We will all do better if we get together to exchange ideas and criticism. Suggestions for improving FPW are welcome.

Why not

- Have a summary what future-programming.org is about on the homepage?

- Help to complete this table: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JJ14iwi-UU4Zw2dc9XHY... (Use the "comment only" dropdown button to request edit access)

- Create a Wiki organizing the information from this thread?

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