Manuel Simoni
@msimoni
geek of programming languages, operating systems, and hypermedia platforms
Sounds like the classic confusion between inheritance and subtyping. Yeah, they're different, and attempts to make them the same will fail. But used properly, both are great.
Nice, a note about Lisp was the MIT AI Memo _No. 1_. Lisp history is so rich—let's not forget that symbolics.com was the first domain name.
They thought about how to build list structure on the IBM 704. The original proposal had functions dealing with all 4 fields of a word (prefix, decrement, tag, address). Eventually prefix and tag were only used internally and we were left with car and cdr. softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/…
I think Fil-C is really strictly safer than rewriting in Java, Rust, or any other memory safe language. Why? Because those other languages require you to use large amounts of unsafe code. In Java, it's the enormous pile of C/C++ code behind all of the native functions. In Rust,…
This is so unbelievably senseless, it is hard to figure out which angle should I take to tackle it. I'll have to unpack this one day.
Eric Schmidt says traditional user interfaces are going to go away. The WIMP model (windows, icons, menus, pull-downs) was built 50 years ago. In the age of agents, UI becomes ephemeral. Generated on demand, shaped by intent, not layout.
So Information Processing Language, an inspiration for Lisp, already had conses.
Link to paper describing IPL. Cons is the “location word” described on the 4th page dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/14…
Lisp works on lists, and those lists are made up of conses (ordered pairs) and nil. What's fascinating about that is that the cons is arguably the simplest possible data structure. Anyone know how McCarthy came up with the cons? Was there any prior art?
Current desktop OSes (and also extensible apps like Emacs) were designed at a time when users and developers were on a first-name basis. Today's challenge is making it possible to run programs written by random internet schizos in a completely secure, but still expressive, way.
V8 is now applying some of the same optimizations it does for JS to languages compiled to WasmGC v8.dev/blog/wasm-spec…
This is even true for tweeting nowadays. We have a crisis of lurking.
I like the quote of mine they picked for this podcast prompt: "I think having a blog is actually one of the most influential things that you can do in modern society because nobody else does it anymore."
"I started with a rather non-consensus hypothesis: companies _want_ to pay for their critical open source dependencies, but most projects are not selling them a legible way to do so." words.filippo.io/geomys/
Among this, @VictorTaelin's work on HVM3, @cue_lang, and IMO Verse, it seems we're finally rethinking the foundations of what it means to "compute" for the first time since the 1930s. Perhaps apropos: almost a century later!
Par, an expressive, concurrent, total* language with linear types and full duality. Based on Linear Logic and Session Types, Par has both functional and imperative features integrating seamlessly
Hasn't happened for me. I will always consider the programming style of Pascal to be the one true style.
What made you fall in love with functional programming?
One thing we frequently see is a "path of paths", e.g. file docs/hello.txt on branch topic/foo in repo manuel/whatever on github.com. Wondering if we should have a syntax like /com/github:/manuel/whatever:/topic/foo:/doc/hello.txt for such "hyperpaths"...
Idea: a long-form, forum-like social medium where you receive all new content once a day, and you can also publish your posts and replies only once a day. This would be like gentlemen scientists of old handled their correspondence.
Equally fascinated by this and unsure whether this is an interesting/worthwhile direction for software.
Oops, built an AI database builder by letting AI access the plugin system. Just a test demo, but kinda wild where malleable software will take us.
I fully understand notation enjoyers, but at the same time it is fascinating just how far you can go with the extreme economy of s-expressions: nothing but sequencing and nesting.
The one who is locked by s-expressions, will never be able to enjoy the pleasure of a good notation.
I think "composition over inheritance" is just completely made up. Why would you favor favor "has" over "is"? See x.com/Ngnghm/status/…
I think the adage of “composition over inheritance” is ingrained in a lot of peoples’ minds and they seem to forget you can decide to do neither.
In earlier media, like print, designooors could only mess up the presentation. Computers, being programmable media, allow designooors to mess up the medium itself.
In web design, hijacking the scrolling mechanism to do something else, like an animation, should be a felony. Messing with the scrolling speed should be a misdemeanor.