Alarming Development

Per Vognsen suggests a Haskell version of the damage function from my Schematic Tables talk:

data Attack = Magic | Melee
hit surprise defense attack = damage
  where effectiveness = power * (if surprise then 3 else 2)
      (power, damage) = case attack of
                        Magic -> (5, max 0 (effectiveness - defense))
                        Melee -> (4, 2 * effectiveness / defense)

This passes pairs of values (power, damage) through conditionals. That allows the conditionals to multiplex more than one value, rather than being repeated. I suspect I could stymie that approach with more complex data flows, but I am happy to acknowledge that Haskell does OK on this example. Thanks, Per.

I have been invited to the Emerging Languages Camp. Sounds like fun. Let’s meet up.

Check out the cool demo of Code Bubbles. This is some very nice, fresh thinking. As Gilad Bracha says, standard IDE’s look like the console of a B-52. I look forward to reading the details, which they are embargoing until their papers are presented. I wonder what UI they used? I see zooming, transparent overlays, and animation. I am guessing Silverlight.

The last several months I have been trying to make coherence deterministic, using what PL theoreticians call a type and effect system. The effect system is telling me to return to the tree data model of Subtext (which I had set aside as too complex), but with static types. Therefore I am redefining Subtext as a statically typed language, with classes and inheritance and so on. I have sketched this out, and it seems to magically resolve many of the complexities that were stumping me before. Continue reading “Typed Subtext”

I am chairing workshops at the Onward conference this year.

The Onward! conference is dedicated to new ideas at the frontier of knowledge about software and programming. Onward! workshops are located a day’s ride past the frontier. They are where groups can explore uncharted ideas. They are an ideal base for intellectual insurrections. Workshops proposals are welcome on all topics related to software and programming, especially topics unacceptable at mainstream Computer Science conferences.

Details here.