DSL

I have to rush to finish my series before AI will completely enshittificate the written knowledge and the classic discipline of programming, which is based on understanding and mathematical rigour. Yes, I seemingly overuse this word beyond the limits of a good style, but I like it, how it is awkward and ugly and yet perfectly captures what a generative AI is doing to a writtern knowledge itself. So, let’s try to build it all top-down, for a change. Bottom up is probably the better way, but it takes so long time before one begins to see the whole picture, which is, of course, the one and the same mountain (or an elephant) viewed from different angles and perspectives. ...

Lets “solve” programming (once again, LOL), in a couple of pages, simply because why tf not. and to put the LLMs and their shills and worshipers into shame (yes, yes, I know, they do not have any). We will build a simple abstract and general “meta-theory”, which is, like a religion grounded on Buddha’s compassion, provide a foundation of peaceful and cooperating traditions, which guide people in their decision making in a overwhelmingly complex Reality by providing easy to understand and easy to apply “heuristics” or “rules of thumb”. ...

Testing interacts with your dopamine system, so you will a small yay! every time all tests passed. This is crucial, because motivation tend to decays exponentially and to experience inevitable “crashes” after spikes. TTD is sort of a direct consequence of type-driven (or “types first”) approach to prototyping. Ideally, each type is associated (in an one-to-one correspondence) with each distinct concept in the problem domain, at an appropriate level of abstraction. ...

Maybe it is time to settle this discurse once and for all, and move on. Recently I asked Deepseek (otherwise amazing), Grok (a meme) and Gemini about idiomatic way of enabling syntax highlighting in blocks of code, which may appear in an eww or nov modes. What they all give me is some stylized pasta from StackOverflow and Github about polymode and mmm-mode and how to use regexps to find particular blocks and to apply some low-level function on a range. ...

There are lots of literal degens (undeveloped, unrefined, lacking any sense of beauty and elegance) who keep parroting the stupid mantra “syntax does not matter” or “syntax is not important”, or “it is a mater of individual prurience”. Idiots. There is a universal human notion which we call [careful and even obsessive] “attention to details”. In certain cultures this part is very prominent, and one can tell. Every neurologically normal person could name that particular country. Other countries had either brief periods of such “enlightenment” in their past, that can still be observed in traditional architectural and art forms, or have some occupations in which attention to details is the paramount, like that long lost German automobile engineering in the 70s and 80s. ...

DATE: <2025-04-22 Tue> A lot in common with cooking, which is (arguably) the simplest and the most ancient form of engineering. (TODO: explain with examples). No one can learn to cook by watching a “food porn” on social networks. It is a “learn-by-doing (and making mistakes)” process. Small, complete (Always Be Compiled) iterations, which conceptually corresponds to “recursive calls” of a spiral-shaped recursive process, which ends up at (converges to) a local optimum. ...

There is a small but turbulent shitstorm on Lobste.rs about Go: https://lobste.rs/s/cclrkn/were_multiple_return_values_go_s_biggest and the key quote, perhaps, is this: I’m always amazed how Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer, with a combined 100+ years experience with PLT and about a dozen languages, are treated as total idiots by people whose greatest hits are building a web app once. There is how I think about it. Back at the late 90s, when suddenly, out of fucking nowhere we have got Internet, FreeBSD and Linux and that Apache httpd, everything seemed to be just as an endless WOW!!! Something new and amazing almost every day. ...

It is that simple. The momentum, which is partially due to the unprecedented AI bubble, is such that it actually became “too big to fail” and too important (for more than one industries) to not be “done right”. 3.14 is getting a proper tail-calls in the interpreter, 3.13 got an initial support for native compilation. It will only continue to get polished by literally millions. The last fundamentally right addition was the support for the proper sum-types (a tagged union) as dataclasses and the the related pattern-matching syntax. ...

Here is the Dan Grossman’s Caml tutorial (refresher) for Ocaml. The cool thing about it is that it shows how little we all need. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~djg/teachingMaterials/gpl/lectures/camlTutorial.pdf He is actually a very cool guy, who teaches the principles (and precise semantics) of programming using the classic languages – SML and Ocaml, which were carefully designed by talented math majors to build theorem provers and proof assistants. These languages (and Erlang) ought to be “all you need”, but the world is what it is (Pootin, Trump and what not) so we have Java or C++ or, if unlucky – PHP or Javascript. ...

What is a pattern? A properly captured by the Mind (of an external observer) into a named abstraction “frequently emerging arrangement”. There are obvious weather patterns, seasonal patterns, social patterns, and so on. The most “concrete” emergent patterns are the “structural patterns” – rivers, trees, proteins, biological species. The most fundamental structural patterns has been captured as abstractions: linear sequences trees (acyclic directed graphs) tables (lookup tables) More abstractions has been derived ...