There is a deeper question undercutting this project (and Bret Victor's Drawing Dead Fish talk and related approaches). That question is: how can we represent computation in an intuitive and scalable way? Conventional programming languages is one answer. They associate programs with text. Some believe there is another way, by associating programs with diagrams. A more abstract example: machine learning associates pro…
> is there a well-defined ordering? > a = 0; b = 1; c = a + b; In pure functional languages, these expressions form a dependency graph and the interpreter or compiler may choose an ordering and may cache intermediate results We may even represent the program itself as a graph, just like you suggest with ML programs, but this is a general purpose program Obviously we can't do this in imperative languages. I think pure…
I think the move towards functional programming, and putting the onus on developers to do the mental elbow grease of converting what are largely macro-style tasks (do this, do that) into functional code (feed this transform into this one) has done a great disservice to software engineering, especially with respect to productivity.
For a specific example: I use map() frequently with a use() clause or some other means of passing immutable variables to the inner scope. I have done the work of building that dependency graph by hand. But I should be able to use a mundane foreach() or even a dreaded for() loop, have the compiler examine my scope and see that I'm using my variables in an immutable fashion, and generate functional code from my imperative code.
What I am getting at is that in the olden days we used synchronous macros do a series of tasks and even though it was mediocre at best, it gave tremendous leverage to the developer. Today the amount of overhead required to map-reduce things or chain promises and carry the mental baggage of every timeout and failure mode is simply untenable for the human brain beyond a certain complexity. What we really need is to be able to read and write code imperatively but have it executed functionally, with every side effect presented for us.
I realize there is a lot of contradiction in what I just said but as far as I can tell, complexity has only increased in my lifetime while productivity has largely slipped. Shifting more and more of the burden to developer proficiency is just exactly the wrong thing to do. I want more from a typical computer today that is 1000 times faster than the ones I grew up on.