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> Those Nile links are good ones, I do recommend following them up. The work that Piumarta and Amelang et al did on STEPS is totally underrated. It has been qu

by scroot 7y ago

> Those Nile links are good ones, I do recommend following them up. The work that Piumarta and Amelang et al did on STEPS is totally underrated. It has been quite sobering to watch these ideas go ignored by the larger community.

hhas01 7y ago
Agreed. Kay &co’s lack of followthrough pains me something awful. Great ideas, promising experiments; but without taking it all the way to finished proven product, that’s all they’ll ever be. And definitely, if they don’t do it themselves, no-one’s going to do it for them. For the other truth is that most people just plain don’t like change, least of all radical change. And programmers are no exception. I mean, they may fancy themselves as brave pioneering visionary techno-utopians building this wonderful new world for everyone, but truth is most are so reactionary ultra-conservative they’d make your crazy John Bircher great uncle blush, and the only future they’re building for everyone else is the one that looks exactly like their own past. Because that’s where their comfort zone is, and that’s where they intend to keep it. Me, I don’t have a comfort zone to preserve: I’m completely uncomfortable everywhere in life. But it is, at least, liberating. :) -- “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw
- scroot 7y ago
  All of those guys had funding trouble. Even HARC didn't last more than a couple of years, I think because the funders pulled out. That Nile/Gezira has languished is especially tough, but I think that's partially because Amelang had some personal troubles [1]. Note that at the bottom of that Github issue there is a link to a recent talk by Amelang in which, eventually, he talks about a new language he is working on called Bert or something. I'm thinking it's a next-gen follow up to Nile. [1] https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/3 https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/3
  - hhas01 7y ago
    Yeah, I’m not surprised (tell me about funding…); even so, seeing it in black&white is still a gut-punch. I mean, any one of FAANG alone could easily run a PARC or VPRI just off loose change in their kitchen kitty. And sure, it’s totally speculative blue-sky R&D that might [probably] never pan out; yet if no-one ever splurged on such gambles now and again we’d all be here having this argument by parchment and quill pen instead! We learn by trying and failing, not by being afraid even to try. And in learning we succeed.
hhas01 7y ago
Good Piumarta talk on the why of building new languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q
- scroot 7y ago
  I have to admit: I've never been able to fully wrap my head around Piumarta's papers for STEPS (in particular the COLA stuff), but think I "get" about 30-40% of it. Even that part I understand sounds like magic.
  - hhas01 7y ago
    30-40%? Damn, you good. I’ve been reading LtU† for fifteen years now, and I’ve gone from getting one word in a hundred to maybe 1 in every 10.:) † lambda-the-ultimate.org
    - scroot 7y ago
      Probably giving myself way too much credit even with the 30%. It's this paper [1] that I've struggled with for years. There is some intuitive part of my brain saying that there's something awesome happening here, but I can't quite understand it. The object model is pretty much the only part I do understand. Would love to have someone explain this all to me like I'm 5. [1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006001a_colaswp.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006001a_colaswp.pdf

by scroot 7y ago

hhas01 7y ago

Agreed. Kay &co’s lack of followthrough pains me something awful. Great ideas, promising experiments; but without taking it all the way to finished proven product, that’s all they’ll ever be. And definitely, if they don’t do it themselves, no-one’s going to do it for them. For the other truth is that most people just plain don’t like change, least of all radical change. And programmers are no exception. I mean, they may fancy themselves as brave pioneering visionary techno-utopians building this wonderful new world for everyone, but truth is most are so reactionary ultra-conservative they’d make your crazy John Bircher great uncle blush, and the only future they’re building for everyone else is the one that looks exactly like their own past. Because that’s where their comfort zone is, and that’s where they intend to keep it. Me, I don’t have a comfort zone to preserve: I’m completely uncomfortable everywhere in life. But it is, at least, liberating. :) -- “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

scroot 7y ago
All of those guys had funding trouble. Even HARC didn't last more than a couple of years, I think because the funders pulled out. That Nile/Gezira has languished is especially tough, but I think that's partially because Amelang had some personal troubles [1]. Note that at the bottom of that Github issue there is a link to a recent talk by Amelang in which, eventually, he talks about a new language he is working on called Bert or something. I'm thinking it's a next-gen follow up to Nile. [1] https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/3 https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/3
- hhas01 7y ago
  Yeah, I’m not surprised (tell me about funding…); even so, seeing it in black&white is still a gut-punch. I mean, any one of FAANG alone could easily run a PARC or VPRI just off loose change in their kitchen kitty. And sure, it’s totally speculative blue-sky R&D that might [probably] never pan out; yet if no-one ever splurged on such gambles now and again we’d all be here having this argument by parchment and quill pen instead! We learn by trying and failing, not by being afraid even to try. And in learning we succeed.

hhas01 7y ago

Good Piumarta talk on the why of building new languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q

scroot 7y ago
I have to admit: I've never been able to fully wrap my head around Piumarta's papers for STEPS (in particular the COLA stuff), but think I "get" about 30-40% of it. Even that part I understand sounds like magic.
- hhas01 7y ago
  30-40%? Damn, you good. I’ve been reading LtU† for fifteen years now, and I’ve gone from getting one word in a hundred to maybe 1 in every 10.:) † lambda-the-ultimate.org
  - scroot 7y ago
    Probably giving myself way too much credit even with the 30%. It's this paper [1] that I've struggled with for years. There is some intuitive part of my brain saying that there's something awesome happening here, but I can't quite understand it. The object model is pretty much the only part I do understand. Would love to have someone explain this all to me like I'm 5. [1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006001a_colaswp.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2006001a_colaswp.pdf