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> Transliterature, in all its incarnations, involves several concepts missing from or alien to mainstream computing: unique permanent addressing for immutable d
by azeirah 8y ago
> Transliterature, in all its incarnations, involves several concepts missing from or alien to mainstream computing: unique permanent addressing for immutable documents and source data, indirect document delivery, visible connections, and external markup. All of these ideas stem from a single basic idea: the manipulation of immutable sequences of bytes with permanent addresses.
> unique permanent addressing for immutable documents and source data
This would make _so much_ sense for programming.
If you copy a function from stackoverflow, or from github, or from a gist, or whatever, you always know where it came from, who wrote it... instead of "copying" where the code is now yours to maintain, you "refer" to it, you "include" it. No-one can tamper with the inclusion, because it is based on some kind of safe cryptography.
Wouldn't this be a great alternative/addition to apis and libraries? It would allow us to include random functions and snippets from any other codebase without ever having to worry about dependencies suddenly breaking everything with updates.
- mjepronk 8y agoYes, for example the Dhall (non-Turing complete) programming language does this: https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang
- aeorgnoieang 8y agoThis is an idea I've seen popup over and over. I suspect the transaction costs in using, let alone maintaining, the tools needed to do this well are what prevent it from ever reaching widespread adoption. Consider the 'leftpad' debacle as one example.