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That's really well said. I've read this before but the way you've described it makes more sense to me. I can see that a similar problem made lisp difficult to c

That's really well said. I've read this before but the way you've described it makes more sense to me. I can see that a similar problem made lisp difficult to catch on, as each application or company was its own ecosystem creating its own dialect with so many bits and pieces that the core language is such a small part as to not really be considered transferable knowledge between shops. I thought making it all cloud-based with realtime collaboration would help, but it wouldn't be nearly enough. At scale there needs to be ensurances of stability--something like realtime tests. I have no idea how something like that could be made to work efficiently enough to be effective.

galaxyLogic 5y ago
It is also interesting to think from the viewpoint of Curry-Howard Isomorphism. Programs are proofs. Progress in mathematics relies on the ability of mathematicians to use other mathematicians proofs as their lemmas. That is possible because all mathematicians speak the same language. But if every programmer has their own version of the base-library that hinders collaboration. And still the base-library must also somehow evolve all the time. Like you say, not an easy problem, but as in mathematics the ability to use other people's software as "lemmas" I think is (or should be) the key problem of Software Engineering research.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  I can relate this to what does happen between ecosystems. We 'black-box' subsets of the problem by splitting up into front-end, back-end, microservices, datastores, etc. This does give some interoperability between languages/ecosystems. Within each language/ecosystem there are library/packages that can serve as a shared/reusable base but still have many challenges in that there typically is no agreed-upon contract. We're even drifting from stability that we had before in that languages themselves evolve more rapidly now often having version/point-version numbers or add-in extensions. Another thing that keeps happening is that languages become popular because of the platform it's tied to gets popular with little correlation to how good the language is in any sense, other than it being adequate to produce a working program. There's at least some possibility of convergence with LLVM backends, wasm or jvm and .NET. I think there will still be more (low-code, online collaborative) before there's any culling and less.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    > there typically is no agreed-upon contract. True. It's the Wild West, at this point

galaxyLogic 5y ago

It is also interesting to think from the viewpoint of Curry-Howard Isomorphism. Programs are proofs. Progress in mathematics relies on the ability of mathematicians to use other mathematicians proofs as their lemmas. That is possible because all mathematicians speak the same language. But if every programmer has their own version of the base-library that hinders collaboration. And still the base-library must also somehow evolve all the time. Like you say, not an easy problem, but as in mathematics the ability to use other people's software as "lemmas" I think is (or should be) the key problem of Software Engineering research.

karmakaze 5y ago
I can relate this to what does happen between ecosystems. We 'black-box' subsets of the problem by splitting up into front-end, back-end, microservices, datastores, etc. This does give some interoperability between languages/ecosystems. Within each language/ecosystem there are library/packages that can serve as a shared/reusable base but still have many challenges in that there typically is no agreed-upon contract. We're even drifting from stability that we had before in that languages themselves evolve more rapidly now often having version/point-version numbers or add-in extensions. Another thing that keeps happening is that languages become popular because of the platform it's tied to gets popular with little correlation to how good the language is in any sense, other than it being adequate to produce a working program. There's at least some possibility of convergence with LLVM backends, wasm or jvm and .NET. I think there will still be more (low-code, online collaborative) before there's any culling and less.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  > there typically is no agreed-upon contract. True. It's the Wild West, at this point