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I don't have a practical solution btw. Even in my own very isolated world where a lot is written from scratch, I run into this issue all the time... Something that has helped me to structure code is to ask "could I in principle write a compiler for the code I'm writing manually".

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If there is no "reducer", complexity is always just going to grow, because that is the easiest way to build something to solve a problem. However to build a "reducer" or "evaluator", you need a way to define meaning other than a black box implementation.

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I completely agree. This idea of a lang that compiles to a distributed system keeps popping into my head, but it seems like you'd need to build everything from scratch because of the lack of semantics of any target lang / tools. WebAssembly does have a formal semantics though

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I saw on your profile that you are writing about this.

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Have you guys looked at unison or darklang?

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I'm vaguely familiar but I'll definitely give them a closer look. I saw a talk about Unison where I thought the point of the lang was the content-addressability. And Darklang is self-described as limited to the backend - my dream is a full-stack solution.

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Ah me too, what I really want is to be able to deploy a service and have that be as simple as writing a phone app.

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And of course get redundancy/scale automatically as part of that. "The pit of success" but for services.

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I think it should be easier than writing a mobile app honestly. For example, the redundancy / scale aspect. That's something that an algorithm can figure out better and more consistently than we can. It reminds me of register allocation in a compiler - no one does that by hand.

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thanks for the links My efforts have mostly been trying to understand by building small things from scratch. I started building a system in Erlang for distributed dataflow, also including generating C for small microcontrollers. Should probably blog something...

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The observation in this context is that the application is often trivial, but the systems programming aspect is really not.

4:27 PM · Jan 11, 2022Twitter Web App

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Even "systems" programs can have simpler representations! Take the sel4OS - they wrote a high-level specification of the functionality, then proved that the C code implements it. The high-level spec was much more useful for proving security properties: sel4.systems