JE Meeting 05/11/19

• dangerous enough to be suppressed
• REBLS publicity chair - find out how much work it is (in total it may be a 10 hour responsibility, email lists, tweeting how often and how many times) - only do if not a lot of work
• community organizing, VC pre-seed?, recruiting, sponsorship, donations, conferences (switching from Slack)
  • might be something there, don’t dismiss this
  • has much more leverage than freelancing, as a means of subsistence, could be a viable platform to support you, potentially not having to work hours for dollars
  • could have a lot of impact given the internet, and maybe it’s better than older models, given how fast you can grow a community
  • and it seems to be working, and people are coming in and asking for more of it, strong signal that it’s working
  • lots of strategic questions of how to do it,
    • recruiting angle a la recurse center but this is tough going
    • hooking up with VCs has pros and cons. they are always looking for deal streams. probably don’t want to lock into relationship with just one. I can set up a seed fund I’m not totally in control of. VC firms also like people that evaluate tech and tech trends for vetting deals
  • dave thomas of OTI and YOW! would be the perfect person to talk to about this. really good guy
• approach is starting from point A and here’s where I got to and here’s what I don’t understand
• it’s not one grand narrative yet, it’s 2-3 vignettes, the connections will arise later
• you discover things along the way, you discover what your research is while doing other things. get a direction and start moving. serendipity happens. don’t get paralyzed with super mega agenda. focus on a smaller interesting issue you think you can make progress on
• the FRP of editing of code is very fruitful field and at an interesting boundary point of PX and PL
  • JE: anything interesting you are going to have trouble finding people to talk to about. by definition you want this so you are not looking under the lamp post
• JE: capability model people, Mark Miller, now at a smart contract place, E language http://www.erights.org/
• but first enable good things and then disable bad things
• JE: the whole point of writing multiple problems is to pick one. and stick with it until stuck. at any one time you need a focus. the whole problem statement can just be the FRP of editing code. pick the problem for the next couple of months of deep thinking
• JE: the approach you want to take needs to solve this problem, so it’s a good chunky problem to solve
• JE: first start with the semantics of what is a program, and what is an edit, maybe take cyrus’s, and start without types because this might require a whole lot of machinery that’s super research-y, hopefully the type theory falls out of it
• SK: the trap door is a mutable dictionary of names to expressions (TODO wait can I have an expression that allows me to point it at other expressions? what would be the type of this?)
• JE: look at paul’s and cyrus’s work and propose what you want to do
• JE: have a meta level where you have the Type type of all types in the base language
• we both agree that closures are an editor feature, not language feature
• JE: the vision is the 3 year plan and now let’s pick a problem to start
• JE: look at what Paul and Runar have written and go to them with questions. If Cyrus wants to chat, first read his things and give him questions as well and see what he says.
• JE: people don’t realize this is a problem because text editors are standard, they don’t see it as mutability, and git is trying to make it immutable
• JE: i want a better way than AST editing
  • not like if statement is a node and if and else –> subtext
• JE: the key vision statement should be extracted and put in /about