JE meeting 11/21/18

• JE meeting 11/21/18
  • Recap
  • drawing ideas
  • Next steps
  • notes from JE
  • His work

Recap

Instead of jumping right into drawing more “ideal worlds”, I was struck by a few thoughts:

1. Sean McDirmid was skeptical of my diagnosis of the key hard parts of Reflex
2. You mentioned dogfooding so I wondered what the best approximation of it was to build something better
3. I wanted to get a better sense of the framework before building abstractions on top of it

So my idea was to try and set up a better Haskell/Reflex experience, film myself building things, and then write down complaints. I wasn’t able to get a better experience (crazy!) so I went ahead and made a list of key complaints and some next step ideas…

https://futureofcoding.org/log#biggest-experience-problems-with-haskellreflex

drawing ideas

• maybe livestream it somehow to encourage me to actually do it?
• think more precisely abstractlbetter distinguish my “vision” from exsiting Haskell alternatives (lamdu, luna, isomorf)
  • the idea of never being able to “delete” anything, nor stop it from running
  • the idea of hashed expressions, particularly with scope
  • exploring which concepts we can move from the language compiler to the editor (no free variables, type inference is just local if not just a type “suggestion”)

Next steps

• p4 next steps
  • read the first 6 chapters of TaPL
  • draw out what a better time would look like
• schedule JE podcast

notes from JE

• they have generators in JS so maybe we have laziness and also weak refs maybe
  • TODO ask ryan trinkle
• building a langauge is a lot but a JS framework is great
  • people would immediately download and play with it
• interpreting haskell seems like a lot of work
• starting from the top (the UI like aprt.us) is good
• could start from a DSL for the streams –> maybe a macro thing for JS or a little lang with syntax and a parser with embedded JS
• he’s skeptical of the Xerox parc advice to build one’s own infrastructure to build what you want on top
• imagining UI is a pain but implementing is weeks or months of work, but a DSL can give you great sense of the UI and so much easier to build
  • the risks with this is that you’ll go with things that are good on paper but hard to visualize
  • tons of DSL tools: spoofax, MPS, look into this for JS
• strongly recommends typescript
  • there’s a lot of work on “functional typescript” and some even have typeclasses!
• subtext in the past has been “parametric in my mind”, living in multiple places in the design space

His work

• minimum viable paradigm
• maybe someone will steal it if it’s communicated well enough
• maybe people would join as contributors and could work on parts
• classically, research is stealing idea – not working with you
• people who cite me is for “inspiration” and I don’t get cited in actual research yet because they are not solid enough –> like how Eve inspired Apple
• ultimate goal is to have an impact and what’s the best way of doing that?
• I’ve always avoided making design commitments but now it feels good to settle down
• think on a time to do a work retreat with JE, maybe Sarah will come
• reminder that PX deadline Feb 1