The first link to IP sums up the misgivings I have with statically typed languages, that I could never quite put my finger on: "If you’re using early-binding l

The first link to IP sums up the misgivings I have with statically typed languages, that I could never quite put my finger on: "If you’re using early-binding languages as most people do, rather than late-binding languages, then you really start getting locked in to stuff that you’ve already done. You can’t reformulate things that easily." -Alan Kay The problem for me is not so much that a variable has a static type once it's been set. It's more that the variable shouldn't even exist in the first place. The way we concentrate so much on variables in C-based languages is really kind of absurd, once we stop to consider that they are only temporary holding sites for the flow of information. I had never quite made the connection before that this is really the problem with the internet at large. We're focussing on websites, IP addresses, servers, etc, when really it's all about the information and the relationships and transformations that connect it. The distributed internet that eventually replaces the one we pay for now will probably work more like a solver, so we'll create a request or query of some kind and the network will derive the solution, which most of the time will amount to simply fetching the data that matches a hash. It will be interesting to see what happens when we throw out archaic protocols like NAT that reduce everyone to second class netizens, and even abandon the idea of data bound to device or location, and think of it more as a medium like time or space where we can freely exchange ideas without having to depend on central points of failure or limiting protocols. What kind of haunts me though is the leverage that this will give software. Imagine how much more powerful the internet is compared to, say, a library. Now imagine if instead of having one computer, with all the limitations we can’t even perceive anymore because we’ve been stuck in these limiting paradigms, we each have thousands or millions at our disposal. I picture it a bit like wolframalpha.com except with natural language processing, so you could ask it anything you wanted, and even if it couldn’t find the answer, it would do its best to reconstruct the missing pieces and get you close to your goal anyway. I just feel in my gut somehow that this will be part of the basis of artificial intelligence, and this general way of storing, retrieving and transforming information by hash, diff, or schema-less relationship and probability works from the lowest level logic gates and languages like Go up to big data APIs like Hadoop. Like maybe what we think of as intelligence is a subset of a universal problem solver. I guess that’s why I’m so interested in a free, distributed internet. It’s like right now what we think of as the internet is really the inside of a cage, and we can see out through the bars and imagine an ecosystem where countless ideas are evolving untamed. I’m not sure if I’ve said anything at all here, but hey, it’s Saturday so might as well post it.