Why programming languages matter [video]

> I am saying that if you want to truly move the art forward, well, we have 5000 other problems that are at least 100x more important than "oh look I can code a basic LISP interpreter".

How does one "move the art forward" without understanding the landscape first? That is, an individual can't know what "forward" means without understanding where they currently are. There isn't a finite number of people over a fixed period of time doing all this. Just because something "is known" to humanity doesn't mean it's known by every individual presently. Each generation must rediscover what previous generations knew, either through raw insight or by knowledge transfer. People aren't born with computing knowledge :)

Viewed this way, how many people in the world, presently, have sufficient knowledge to "move the art forward"? How many have the means? I'd put it at a few hundred. Maybe you're one of them?

You explicitly say you can't be easily disuaded from your opinion, so maybe I'm just spitting into the wind. However, rather than talk down on people doing the hard work of learning where they're at in history, being excited my genuinely exciting things, and taking the necessary steps to "move the art forward", maybe you could assist them by sharing your experience? Or, simply move the art forward yourself :)

PS: Play is exactly what's needed. That's how humans learn and discover :) But maybe we need to play more efficiently? ;)

Functional languages have a core that is well suited for parallelism, but all mainstream functional languages have various features that are unsuitable for parallel execution - particularly if you want to target limited machines like GPUs.

The Futhark programming model is standard functional combinators: map, reduce, scan, etc. You can do that in any Functional language, and it is mostly trivial to rewrite a Futhark program in Haskell or SML or OCaml. Futhark removes a lot of things (like recursive data structures) to make efficient parallel execution easier (and even possible), and adds various minor conveniences. But you don't really need to add something for functional programming to be suitable for parallelism; you just have to avoid certain common things (like linked lists or laziness).

> How does one "move the art forward" without understanding the landscape first?

Practice data structures, make complex algorithms described in books (most of which are free, and the rest are maximum $35), code a small program for an embedded controller for once to see how the sausage is made first-hand, participate in different kinds of open-source. There are plenty of ways outside of "the world needs one more LISP interpreter".

> Just because something "is known" to humanity doesn't mean it's known by every individual presently.

Sadly. I wish I belonged to another species where this assertion was not true. Sigh.

> Viewed this way, how many people in the world, presently, have sufficient knowledge to "move the art forward"? How many have the means? I'd put it at a few hundred. Maybe you're one of them?

Me? Absolutely not, I am 43 and at this point I am severely burned out. I had so many ideas and ambitions but working for the man for 22 years has crushed me. Maybe if I get a bag of money in the upper 7 digits I'll be able to reignite my tinkering spirit but we don't live in fairly land and this is not happening so nope. You're looking at one more person who was crushed by the free market forces.

That being said, you have people working on e.g. the Rust compiler or OCaml in general. Likely a bunch of geniuses and I love it that they are actually funded and are keeping up the good fight. Gives me some hope.

> maybe you could assist them by sharing your experience?

Yes, that's the best idea really: education. But as we all know (1) younger people never listen to advice, and (2) I probably never found the right audience (though thinking of it I am starting to see some lectures popping up lately in my city again, maybe I should try to go). I've been told I am excellent mentor (as recently as 3 months ago) but my health and time constraints prevent me from doing it more.

But how do you educate people to be unhappy with the status quo? I seriously don't know. The human brain is kind of like this: "Hey I am not hungry, I have where to sleep and most of my basic needs are covered, I guess the world is perfect and I don't need to change anything at all anywhere". Observed it thousands of times in my life and I am bitter about it to this day, likely to my grave.

> But maybe we need to play more efficiently?

Yep, I would not be against some central "authority" website / app that distributes "play" tasks to whoever is willing to do them (obviously with plenty of repetition and redundancy, you can't have 10 people agree to tackle on 10 different tasks and then they never show up again). And this does not remove choice, you can still present people with like 50 choices and they surely will identify with at least one of them.

All this free energy, wasted all the time. [sighs deeply] I wish we had more structure and direction is what I am saying all along.

The vast majority of it is, unfortunately. That's starting to change, though, as we are hitting some pretty severe maintenance and performance issues, as well as being bottlenecks to making changes, that all the abstraction is obviously the root cause of. None of the services the team I used to lead utilized OOP (in the sense you're referring to), and the new team I lead will be making sweeping changes to move away from it under my guidance.

It served its purpose, but we've outgrown it.

Just because something's old doesn't mean it's not relevant, yes might not've been the best language to suggest - the more modern BQN, Uiua and Singeli exist too - but it's still a fairly niche paradigm. Ideas tend to come in cycles too - look at the 1980s ideas of the transputer or connection machine.

I wanted to point towards a programming paradigm that's approach enables you to take advantage of the parallel execution possible within chips today due to the notation being both precise in intent yet vague in execution. Take summing an array (`+/vector`) or selecting values given a boolean mask (`mask/values`) - both these very simple expressions are expressible directly in SIMD instructions, as there's no for loop index enforcing an order.