Will Crichton on Twitter: "...The trend at confs like ICFP has been unbreakable abstractions. But systems that result from that, esp editors, are not as flexible at runtime like Emacs. But the balance is hard to find and keep the system comprehensible."

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 21

"Having talks, aimed at specific audiences, about topics that matter, hosted on YouTube, matters."pic.twitter.com/qUpjYMWuRd

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 21

Q: Thoughts on Typed Clojure and using dynamism to manage complexity? A: I don't think C++/Java/etc types are rich enough. If your program is imperative, your problems will be dominated by state. Types cause code to be far more specific and far less reusable than it ought to be.

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 21

Q: How did you decide on terms like "concretion" and "complect"? A: I love the dictionary Eg for complect, I was trying to give more specificity to an old notion, coupling, that system designers understand intuitively.

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 21

Btw, I'm not covering every talk in this thread (time constraints, and POPL deadline in 2 weeks lmao). But the papers are all freely available here: https://dl.acm.org/toc/pacmpl/2020/4/HOPL … And the video talks + Q&A will be posted eventually! So be sure to check them out.

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 22

Morten Kromberg presents the post-1978 history of APL. The APL ecosystem initially split around the question: when nesting items in arrays, do those items need to be explicitly "boxed" or not?pic.twitter.com/Ijrm6SZhwV

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 22

Dozens of flavors of APL sprung up in this period. APL was definitively an idea up for grabs, and not a language steered by a single person or org. Probably most like SQL in that regard.pic.twitter.com/8UZwDVm0Vl

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 22

"APL is a notation as much a programming language, and it's important for subject matter experts to be able to use APL on the whiteboard and argue about it. I've seen open source APLs lead to fragmentation, which reduces the value of a notation."

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 22

Stefan Monnier and Michael Sperber presented the history of Emacs Lisp. One focus: modern Elisp has two distinct dialects, dynamically scoped (originally) and statically scoped (added later).

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 22

Will Crichton Retweeted Will Crichton

"Back then, dynamic scoping was considered efficient. Lexical scoping seemed kind of expensive to implement. Lexical scoping requires the creation of closures." Same underlying reason as Logo, but different conclusion (performance vs. learnability)https://twitter.com/wcrichton/status/1406999997527191552 …

Will Crichton added,

Will Crichton @wcrichton

"In a language for learners, we still believe [dynamic scoping] is the correct choice. If a variable exists, it's visible."

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 22

Q: Advice for systems adding dynamic scoping, eg React contexts? A: Picolisp creator said: "Modularity is the ability to reach into a system's guts and make it do what you want." Unconventional, but not wrong. Dynamic scoping enables users to make Emacs do what you want done.

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Will Crichton‏ @wcrichton Jun 22

...The trend at confs like ICFP has been unbreakable abstractions. But systems that result from that, esp editors, are not as flexible at runtime like Emacs. But the balance is hard to find and keep the system comprehensible.

1:29 PM - 22 Jun 2021