Technical dimensions of programming systems(tomasp.net) |
Technical dimensions of programming systems(tomasp.net) |
Namely mutability, side effects, formal verification ie. How equational / axiomatic a language is, how static/dynamic a language is (runtime typing etc), how concurrent, how scoped a language is eg. Red vs Koka.
All of the above have a massive influence on the structure and intent of a language.
Koka has to be lexically scoped, to cleanly handle effect types: https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/book.html#sec-hello-wor...
There is a world of difference between these approaches, both in terms of the runtime/compiler support, and the real-world use cases.
> Programming is done in a stateful environment, by interacting with a system through a graphical user interface.
i think all statments in that sentence could be argued with.
Eg., you could have a gravitationally stable solar system whose planets, etc. you identified with terms (etc.) and observe that the whole thing runs at zero-energy.
This distinguishes abstract algorithms, which are just restatements of mathematics, from "programs" which are algorithms defined for electrical devices with relevant useful capacities.
if i enter (+ 1 2) which is a lisp program, where is the state? in the context of lisp.
but of course, everything is stateful at the end of the day - that's what your cpu is up to.
It sounds like this work end up producing something that does not even consider the reality of the field but only what the author's imagine the field would be.
In that scope it is deeply interesting of course. And what they point to in the opening is important. But i would have loved an implementation that does look at how easy each system make testing. Composability. Refactoring. Linting. Different compilers. Repl. New projects. Compiler driven development. Formatting. Etc
There is a wide analysis of the technical side to do there between php and Rust as example. It feels like a missed opportunity.
Pen and paper still has some feedback as one can see more than can be held in working memory.
edit: typo
"Functional programming is great! You don't need to worry about the outside environment, it just works! Why, even if you unplug the computer, it just works—no, wait. These are all abstractions."
The execution environment is the invariant the webpage starts out with. The programming environment, and its relation to state, can be changed.