4 ms·
Is it the magical solution to all of life's problems? No. It is damn impressive. Yes. Right now we live in a world where everything we do depends on multipl
by corysama 10y ago
Is it the magical solution to all of life's problems? No. It is damn impressive. Yes.
Right now we live in a world where everything we do depends on multiple layers of 10s-100s of millions of lines of code each for the compilers, the operating systems, the browsers or platform libraries (ex Qt). It's physically impossible to read a significant amount of the code in any of these layers, much less understand it. Then we get to add in modules and libraries like Boost or Js-Framework-Melange-Of-The-Week and we don't even know how anything we are doing with the topmost platform level even works. We've gone from Fortran to this in 60 years. What is this going to look like in another 60 years?
An alternative future is something like Nile. Reading Nile's code requires some up-front study. That sounds like work compared to "I can look at a for-loop in any package and know instantly that it is for-looping er... something... for some reason..." But, it's the kind of up-front study that is reasonable for a smart high schooler to pull off. With reasonable effort, that kid could understand literally every character of the Nile source and start making major, sweeping modifications. Contrast that with Cairo --which at a high level is not much more complex than Nile, but I'll be damned if anyone but it's maintainers can claim to understand every line and make major changes.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoSpot on. That's the whole point. The closest thing I've seen to this in something even near a mainstream language is REBOL/RED projects. They're sending whole apps that fit on floppies using DSL-based methods while majority are rendering web pages & doing basic libraries in mere megabytes. (!?) Keeps growing and how could we possibly handle it? Good to see some work in a different direction.
- andreapaiola 10y agoIn 60 years the software will write itself http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-firs...
- jules 10y agoThat's what they thought a couple of decades ago too. I've heard of some research into programming languages decades ago not getting funded because "in a few years we won't need programming languages anyway". It might be true this time, but it might not.
- andreapaiola 10y agoOk, but progress is progress. What does it matter what happened 20 years ago?
- walterbell 10y ago> kid could understand literally every character of the Nile source and start making major, sweeping modification This also improves security: auditing correctness and writing mandatory access control policies in another DSL.