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Linda and Syndicate figured this out - it’s just that most engineers are not programming language designers or researchers, and most researchers are not designi
by mccoyb 3mo ago
Linda and Syndicate figured this out - it’s just that most engineers are not programming language designers or researchers, and most researchers are not designing robust scalable language implementations.
- sirwhinesalot 3mo agoIt's crazy to me that Linda came out 40 years ago. I think our field is completely blind to what was achieved in the past. Smalltalk is to me the most obvious case where people somehow don't realize we had a fully live environment, where the entire IDE (or really the whole operating system) could have open heart surgery done on it while it was running, in the late 1970s! And that's a language that is at least somewhat in the public consciousness, languages like Linda? Nobody knows them. Synchronous languages like Lustre and Esterel? Some engineers know them (and pay good money for them), but not software engineers.
- KayEss 3mo agoI have fond memories of bricking my Smalltalk environment several times trying to get instance behaviour working :-)
- sph 3mo agoLinda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(coordination_language) By Syndicate you mean syndicated actors?
- mccoyb 3mo agoExactly, the work of Tony Garnock-Jones: https://syndicate-lang.org/ https://syndicate-lang.org/
- ElevenLathe 3mo agoThank you for pointing me to Linda -- fascinating and my mind is popping with fun projects related to this model. It actually seems quite spiritually similar to "Bank Python" (https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html), but more elegant.