Sentient: a high-level, declarative programming language

This is pretty neat about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429393.

So the webdev crowd have invented Prolog?

Something feels kind of "right" about this in the same sense that machine learning techniques seem to be able to produce correct results. In my "things that exist in Star Trek:TNG that we should be making more progress on" list, I think that how we program is wrong for a great many of use-cases.

In the Star Trek fictional universe, you often see characters programming impossibly complex things very quickly. There's several episodes where a character will create a holodeck simulation simply by describing what they want and providing detail for the parts the computer got wrong until the simulation is more or less what they want.

I feel like in some cases we're starting to figure this out like with GauGAN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5U4NgVGAwg

But what about other cases? Can we just sort of describe the output we want, feed in data and have the computer more or less figure out the set of functions that produces what we're looking for? Such a paradigm would basically allow anybody to make a huge array of one-off, ultra-custom, long-tail, "programs" that solve extremely niche needs without needing to learn all the rigor of actually programming.

I think one programming paradigm that is very underserved is something in the sorts of filters.

GPU shaders, Signal Processing or a Nginx filter are all on this line of thinking.

We should be more inclined into program things as filters where we manipulate and maybe mutate/transform the data that is passing through that filter, so this could be easily paralelized, cut a lot of expensive CPU branches and where humans and machines could work together making those filters. (It would be much easiar for an AI to infer/learn about how to program like this)

In this perspective how we layout and shape the data is much more important.. so if we could create new standards where we can represent anything as a matrix for instance, we could have state-of-the-art engines who would care about scheduling, compilation and paralelization so we could only focus on manipulate and transform data according to the goals of what we are trying to achieve.

Apparently these days Excel has a bunch of features like that for data cleanup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqV9BlxEG5s

Horribly patent-encumbered, of course, so you can't use it outside Excel, but still.