Lambda the Ultimate

Have we ever discussed the Pure Language or other term rewriting languages at LtU? There are some interesting examples.

Ages?

I've recently went back to Papert's notion of "object-to-think-with" for a paper I am writing (on simulations in population genetics). It's in Mindstorms. I was reminded how inspiring that book was. (I read it as a kid, so I wasn't the target audience, but his story about gears sure made me think about gears a lot.)

My son is 11 now, but was 7 when he first got started with Minecraft (and I tried a few other games with him before that). I also really liked Papert's Mindstorms book and many of the other things that he wrote. It's very sad that he died recently.

Redstone is a fun way to think about circuits, almost like real electrical circuits in a lot of ways. Now my son spends a lot of time playing Pokemon and seems to have a lot of wild theories about combining probabilities (but I have a hard time following all of it).

Yeah, we should try Minecraft... My daughter didn't seem interested (she somewhat enjoyed the books). In school they were introduced to CodeMonkey. Don't get me started on Pokemon.

Still sounds very PLy to me...

Yes. But communities are formed around conversations, and the PL community just isn't interested in having these conversations. And we won't be competing with the machine learning zeitgeist head on unless we change up our game.

Or to put it this way: there is an obvious opportunity of applying PL concepts in new ways to create new user experiences. But it is post-PL, it doesn't have to fit in the current socially defined framework that we see as PL.

Fortunately, we of LtU are our own community.

I'm not leaving LtU, well, I don't interact much here anymore. But when I have something new to show, I'll post it for sure.

You should turn that idea into tools people can use for logics. I.e., define a logic and interactively 'debug' it. Could be useful for lots of PhD students.

Then again, there already is ghc..

Fields of research are defined by the set of questions they ask. When the questions seem irrelevant it's time to start a new field.

Afaik, science is driven by funding, and funding is driven by political consensus. In the end, science is where the money is.

PL can't "leave you" if what you're doing isn't what PL research normally does.

Most PL research focuses on dealing with symbolic languages. This has naturally tended to gravitate towards the formal possibilities this entails, for a variety of good reasons.

The idea that fields are "defined by the set of questions they ask" doesn't capture the existence of relationships between the questions. It suggests an arbitrariness that doesn't match the observed reality. Some classification systems are more useful than others.

There's a very natural division between the user interface to programming, and the symbolic representation, manipulation, and comprehension of programs. It doesn't seem at all surprising that these would be different fields or subfields.

There are many concerns that are mostly confined to the user interface & experience field, but languages with a visual representation are still going to have mappings to a symbolic form. As soon as you're dealing with something for which such a mapping exists, all traditional PL research will apply.

We don't generally confuse tools like spreadsheets, or Mathematica, with mathematics itself. The case with PLs seems quite similar.

Fields pivot all the time. They chase after the hotness, AI becomes machine learning becomes deep learning, almost no one is doing old AI anymore because...no one will read their papers or fund their projects.

PL was supposed to have a monopoly on the use of language to instruct computers by building programs, but how that is actually defined by the community is very narrow. In fact, that PL has not cared much about programmer experiences at all is a travesty, this neglect have had huge detrimental effects on otherwise very viable languages (e.g. one that starts with an S). Language cannot be detached from how it is used, or the interface that it is used. If it is, then it just becomes another theory area that most people won't be able to emphasize with.

But anyways, I'm not even worried about this. Rather, ya, some of the PL concepts we kick around the community can be usefully applied to programming and programming environments, but we don't talk about that, so you aren't going to be able to pick out those ideas in context by reading POPL proceedings, for example. For the work I'm doing, language is a means, not an end.

I increasingly see people concerned with the human aspects of PL moving into adjacent fields such as HCI, Design, Information Science, and Education.

We don't generally confuse tools like spreadsheets, or Mathematica, with mathematics itself.

You could arguably make the case that that is exactly what a lot of academic research is about. Confusion of tools with mathematics, i.e., the tool should be mathematical as possible. This whereas tools which concentrate on just being tools, a convenient thing in the hands of a programmer, usually beat whatever that line of thought produces.

Not against that line of research, but the premise might be wrong.

Now what was that language that emphasized mixins...

Scala at one time.

There will probably be at least one more language supporting mixins in the near future ;-)

It is a fun game, but I don't seem to get what it has to do with programming?

The Lambda Calculus is a way that describes how the computer works, when programmers should really focus on abstraction and problem solving, lambda is a silent implementation detail.

Incidentally, I wonder what a game focused around abstraction would look like? Take concrete things, generalize them, use them in different ways?

That was so addictive that I finished all 72 of them. Now I am not sure whether to thank or scoff you.

Great game.

This is very nice. It might even serve as an introduction to sub-structural logics and/or the linear lambda-calculus.

My only wish in doing them is that you had a couple of harder puzzles for each new concept you introduce, before moving on to the next concept. For example, is it even possible to make a wrong move on puzzle 71, the penultimate puzzle?

It is an excellent introduction to the experience of programming because it progressively introduces new notation that is more cumbersome but the same power as the old. The only problem is that it has been made easy to the point that there is not much "puzzle" involved in the puzzle game. Linearly and affine typed objects would make the game more interesting and they are a common feature of puzzle games.

I introduced it to the #esoteric channel and they were excited by thought that unlocking the hidden levels would give you access to delimited continuations. I think adding continuations would also would have some interesting puzzle possibilities.

Welcome back, Luke :)