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When was the last time you saw a critic write a play, compose a symphony, carve a statue?
I've seen a couple of attempts. I thought they were dire, myself. I won't name names (or media), as these are friends of friends.
Some concrete examples. I have given dozens on liam-on-linux.livejournal.com, but I wonder if I can summarise.
[1]
Abstractions. Some of our current core conceptual models are poor. Bits, bytes, directly accessing and managing memory.
If the programmer needs to know whether they are on a 32-bit or 64-bit processor, or whether it's big-endian or little-endian, the design is broken.
Higher-level abstractions have been implemented and sold. This is not a pipedream.
One that seems to work is atoms and lists. That model has withstood nearly 50Y of competition and it still thrives in its niche. It's underneath Lisp and Scheme, but also several languages far less arcane, and more recently, Urbit with Nock and Hoon. There is room for research here: work out a minimal abstraction set based on list manipulation and tagged memory, and find an efficient way to implement it, perhaps at microcode or firmware level.
( Read more... )
I've seen a couple of attempts. I thought they were dire, myself. I won't name names (or media), as these are friends of friends.
Some concrete examples. I have given dozens on liam-on-linux.livejournal.com, but I wonder if I can summarise.
[1]
Abstractions. Some of our current core conceptual models are poor. Bits, bytes, directly accessing and managing memory.
If the programmer needs to know whether they are on a 32-bit or 64-bit processor, or whether it's big-endian or little-endian, the design is broken.
Higher-level abstractions have been implemented and sold. This is not a pipedream.
One that seems to work is atoms and lists. That model has withstood nearly 50Y of competition and it still thrives in its niche. It's underneath Lisp and Scheme, but also several languages far less arcane, and more recently, Urbit with Nock and Hoon. There is room for research here: work out a minimal abstraction set based on list manipulation and tagged memory, and find an efficient way to implement it, perhaps at microcode or firmware level.
( Read more... )
