Vigil: A programming language with eternal moral vigilance

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #2

Eternal moral vigilance is the price of coding liberty! This project clearly needs to be amended to integrate with version control.

Source control allows one to bypass the moral purity of Vigil by recovering arbitrary sinful code from the past. Moral purity can not be advanced while the sins of the past remain with us forever, uncleansed. One can only properly use Vigil without any sort of source control. Even copying files before the compiler tries to run it is an attempt to cheat the system; for that, Vigil would be justified in deleting your entire code base and all the copies it could find.

Or perhaps justified in deleting you instead, as it is you who has sinned, not the source code.

...

Certainly this approach leads to a more pure universe, but, I suspect, a rather sparsely populated one.

(Eliezer, do me a favor and keep munificent away from AI development....)

Re: Vigil: A programming language with eternal moral vigilance

#8

Post by MichaelAza » Thu, Jan 03, 2013, 4:31 PM UTC

You know, I don't think this is a half bad idea. I mean, deleting offending code is a bit much, but shouldn't a code-by-contract language not allow code that failed a contract to be compiled until it changes? That would seem to make sense.

Re: Vigil: A programming language with eternal moral vigilance

#9

Post by gmaslov » Thu, Jan 03, 2013, 4:35 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #3

CONSTANT NEVER-CEASING VIGILANCE!

Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the unclean.

Re: Vigil: A programming language with eternal moral vigilance

#10

Post by angersock » Thu, Jan 03, 2013, 4:37 PM UTC

Code for the code gods, scrum for the scrum throne.

Seriously, this is some Imperium of Man PL research.