5 ms·

> I wonder if there's a similar overlooked-but-universal problem that someone in a garage is working on now, that'll spark a new wave similar to the dot-com bo

by breck 9y ago

> I wonder if there's a similar overlooked-but-universal problem that someone in a garage is working on now, that'll spark a new wave similar to the dot-com boom. I've got one for you. I've found a simpler universal grammar for programming languages. All modern programming languages use BNF grammars for syntax, and these have been researched and developed for about 60 years. But sitting unexplored for 60 years, has been another type of grammar, that uses only geometry to notate structure (achieved in practice via whitespace). I believe this new branch of languages will prove far superior to BNF languages in time, once tooling catches up. I'm self-funding research on this. Like your description of the early web, it's really unimpressive now (http://ohayo.computer http://ohayo.computer, https://github.com/breck7/treeprogram https://github.com/breck7/treeprogram), but think it will catch on and be big. It seems so obvious to me when you improve something so low level that it will have big effects. But it's been hard to convince other research groups, and of course I could be wrong.

halfteatree 9y ago
So... lisp with optional parentheses?
- breck 9y ago
  Close. Except absolutely no parentheses. The important thing is that your words are laid out according to geometric rules, not via character delimiters. This has big implications for static tools, as well as future hardware that can execute trees directly (right now prototypes with FPGAs).
pron 9y ago
The problem with this is not so much that pretty much no one is able to make money off of programming languages, but what may be one of the causes of that effect: Few if any programming languages at least in the past 20 years have been able to make much of an impact at all (meaning, significantly reduce the cost of software development). Pretty much the last one has been garbage collection. So it's always possible we're one good idea away from a breakthrough, but I, for one, am skeptical, and if there were such a revolutionary idea, it would -- like any PL progress -- be slowly carried out and perfected over decades by many research groups.
- breck 9y ago
  > Few if any programming languages at least in the past 20 years have been able to make much of an impact at all (meaning, significantly reduce the cost of software development) Agreed. I think orthogonal things like LLVM and Git have made a significant impact, but other than that it seems advances in PL have just been bringing ideas from Lisp or other 1950's-1970's languages into modern PLs. > if there were such a revolutionary idea, it would -- like any PL progress -- be slowly carried out and perfected over decades by many research groups. Also agreed. Although I do hope for my own sake that if TN is as good as I suspect, it catches on faster. Two promising areas of research that could accelerate resource allocation are a crypto in ETNs from the ground up and a neural net aided IDE tool.

by breck 9y ago

halfteatree 9y ago

So... lisp with optional parentheses?

breck 9y ago
Close. Except absolutely no parentheses. The important thing is that your words are laid out according to geometric rules, not via character delimiters. This has big implications for static tools, as well as future hardware that can execute trees directly (right now prototypes with FPGAs).

pron 9y ago

The problem with this is not so much that pretty much no one is able to make money off of programming languages, but what may be one of the causes of that effect: Few if any programming languages at least in the past 20 years have been able to make much of an impact at all (meaning, significantly reduce the cost of software development). Pretty much the last one has been garbage collection. So it's always possible we're one good idea away from a breakthrough, but I, for one, am skeptical, and if there were such a revolutionary idea, it would -- like any PL progress -- be slowly carried out and perfected over decades by many research groups.

breck 9y ago
> Few if any programming languages at least in the past 20 years have been able to make much of an impact at all (meaning, significantly reduce the cost of software development) Agreed. I think orthogonal things like LLVM and Git have made a significant impact, but other than that it seems advances in PL have just been bringing ideas from Lisp or other 1950's-1970's languages into modern PLs. > if there were such a revolutionary idea, it would -- like any PL progress -- be slowly carried out and perfected over decades by many research groups. Also agreed. Although I do hope for my own sake that if TN is as good as I suspect, it catches on faster. Two promising areas of research that could accelerate resource allocation are a crypto in ETNs from the ground up and a neural net aided IDE tool.