> Similarly, he casually mentions a programming language founded on unique principles designed for concurrency, he doesn't name it but that language is Erlang.
I haven't seen the talk yet and just browsed the slides, but just from your description Mozart/Oz could also fit the bill since it was designed for distributed/concurrent programming as well. Furthermore, Oz's "Browser" has some f-ing cool interactive stuff made possible due to the specific model of concurrency in the system. I must say that programming in Mozart/Oz feels completely different to Erlang, despite that fact that both have a common origin in Prolog.
<edit: adding more ..>
> He is stuck in a model where "programming" is the act of translating an idea to a machine representation. But we've known for decades that at best this is a minority amount of the work necessary to build software.
There is a school of thought whereby "programming" is the act of coding itself. To put it in other words, it is a process of manipulating a formal system to cause effects in the world. That system could be a linear stream of symbols, or a 2D space of tiles, or any of myriad forms, but in the end much of the "pleasure of programming" is attributable to the possibility of play with such a system.
To jump a bit ahead, consider the Leap Motion controller. What if we had a system built where we can sculpt 3D geometries and had a way to map these "sculptures" to programs for doing various things? I say this 'cos "programming", a lot of the times, feels like origami to me when I'm actually coding. Lisps, in particular, evoke that feeling strongly. So, I'm excited about Leap Motion for the potential impact it can have on "programming".
I think representations are important, and the "school of direct manipulation" misses this point. Just because we have great computing power at our finger tips today, we won't revert to using roman numerals for numbers. One way to interpret the claims of proponents of direct manipulation is that programming ought to be a dialogue between a representation and the effect on the world instead of a monologue or, at best, a long distance call.
Bret has expressed favour for dynamic representations in some of his writings, but I'm not entirely sure that they are the best for dynamic processes. There is nothing uncool about static representations like code. (Well, that's all we've had for ages now, anyway.) What we've been lacking is a variety of static representations, since language has been central to our programming culture and history. What would an alien civilization program in if they had multidimensional communication means?
To conclude, my current belief is that anyone searching for "the one language" or "the one system" to rule them all is trying to find Joshu's "Mu" by studying scriptures. Every system (a.k.a. representation) is going to have certain aspects that it handles well and certain others that it does poorly on. That ought to be a theorem or something, but I'm not sophisticated enough, yet, to formally articulate that :)
I haven't seen the talk yet and just browsed the slides, but just from your description Mozart/Oz could also fit the bill since it was designed for distributed/concurrent programming as well. Furthermore, Oz's "Browser" has some f-ing cool interactive stuff made possible due to the specific model of concurrency in the system. I must say that programming in Mozart/Oz feels completely different to Erlang, despite that fact that both have a common origin in Prolog.
<edit: adding more ..>
> He is stuck in a model where "programming" is the act of translating an idea to a machine representation. But we've known for decades that at best this is a minority amount of the work necessary to build software.
There is a school of thought whereby "programming" is the act of coding itself. To put it in other words, it is a process of manipulating a formal system to cause effects in the world. That system could be a linear stream of symbols, or a 2D space of tiles, or any of myriad forms, but in the end much of the "pleasure of programming" is attributable to the possibility of play with such a system.
To jump a bit ahead, consider the Leap Motion controller. What if we had a system built where we can sculpt 3D geometries and had a way to map these "sculptures" to programs for doing various things? I say this 'cos "programming", a lot of the times, feels like origami to me when I'm actually coding. Lisps, in particular, evoke that feeling strongly. So, I'm excited about Leap Motion for the potential impact it can have on "programming".
I think representations are important, and the "school of direct manipulation" misses this point. Just because we have great computing power at our finger tips today, we won't revert to using roman numerals for numbers. One way to interpret the claims of proponents of direct manipulation is that programming ought to be a dialogue between a representation and the effect on the world instead of a monologue or, at best, a long distance call.
Bret has expressed favour for dynamic representations in some of his writings, but I'm not entirely sure that they are the best for dynamic processes. There is nothing uncool about static representations like code. (Well, that's all we've had for ages now, anyway.) What we've been lacking is a variety of static representations, since language has been central to our programming culture and history. What would an alien civilization program in if they had multidimensional communication means?
To conclude, my current belief is that anyone searching for "the one language" or "the one system" to rule them all is trying to find Joshu's "Mu" by studying scriptures. Every system (a.k.a. representation) is going to have certain aspects that it handles well and certain others that it does poorly on. That ought to be a theorem or something, but I'm not sophisticated enough, yet, to formally articulate that :)