Friday, January 20, 2012

Fun with Kernel

Smug Kernel Weenies - known to be even smugger than Smug Lisp Weenies - are advised to check out Dale Schumacher's series on Kernel:
Besides vau (known as the Wow Combinator by fans, Frankenexpressions by critics), that unifies functions and (hygienic) macros in a single concept (with some open questions), one of my favorite Kernel features are first-class environments. They're just cute.

First-class environments have been shown to exhibit nice properties (e.g. you can write a module system in userland), and solve some of Scheme's problems (such as the letrec black hole), by Queinnec in the somewhat difficult to read Sharing Code Through First-class Environments. I think all designers of new dynamic languages should seriously consider them.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Why I find Dart's production mode evil

Why Dart Types Are Optional and Unsound contains the following example:
class Mammal {}
class Cow extends Mammal { String moo() => 'moo!'; }
class Pig extends Mammal { String oink() => 'oink!'; }

Mammal mammal = new Mammal();
Cow cow = new Cow();
Pig pig = new Pig();

mammal = cow; // [1]
pig = mammal; // [2] Checks OK statically, but now pig holds a Cow.
print(pig.oink()); // [3] NoSuchMethodException if we get this far.
In production mode, the type declaration that pig holds instances of Pig is simply ignored at [2]! IMO, this should never happen. The Dart team's reasoning is that this is still "safe", because you'll get a NoSuchMethodException at [3].

But think about it: you might get the NoSuchMethodException at a completely different place in the program! What good are type declarations/assertions when you never know whether they are true? It actually feels worse than having no type declarations at all!

Thankfully, in Dart's checked mode, you will get the error at [2], making this behavior less troubling. But given that the page says that "type checks are not a major drain on performance", why have production mode at all?

Update: Relief! Bob Nystrom writes on HN:
My understanding was that the prime original motivation for unchecked mode was indeed performance. As our Dart implementations are getting more mature, we're starting to get a better picture of how it does actually impact performance.

I think what we're starting to see is that the performance implications aren't that bad. Given that, I think we're focusing less and less on production mode. It's still a valid option and it may make sense for some users but it may not be commonly used, sort of like -Ofast in gcc.

Small data and humble sequentialism

Yeah, big data and massive parallelism in the cloud are exciting!

But there are two problems with the cloud:
  1. Technical: doing stuff in centralized data centers, when all of your users have multiple, hugely overprovisioned computing devices is a bit of a joke.
  2. Political: do you actually want to have all your users' data, and take on the huge responsibilities and risks associated with that?
The cloud is really a reaction to browsers' highly limited request-response interaction style. But browsers have changed now, they're becoming little operating systems.

May I suggest to take a fresh look at small data and humble sequentialism in 2012?

Type systems vs interactivity

On Twitter last night, Paul Snively and I had one of our recurring type systems vs interactivity discussions.

Paul made his point clear:
My thesis is that programmers' ability to be logically inconsistent in a formal sense at any stage of development is overrated. #
To which I replied, equally grandly:
Without the ability to be inconsistent, you can't support the Lisp Experience™ #
My point is this: current type systems treat type checking as a batch job. But:
Intermittently, during editing, programs are nonsense. then we bring them back into consistency. type systems should support this #
I'd really love to treat type system outputs not as one-off errors that prevent running the program, but rather as a dynamic console of warnings, that updates as I change the - running - program. Every warning corresponds to a point in the program where I might get a runtime error if I were to run the program at this moment.

Update: James Iry blogged about the same conversation in Type Errors as Warnings.

Update 2: Paul Snively added another nice quote:
I observe that I'm given to extremes: give me Kernel or give me Coq! #
Update 3: Great minds think alike. Brian McKenna reports:
Simon Peyton-Jones talked about this a couple of times with me. It's something he's going to try with GHC #
Update 4: around 27:00 in this talk, SPJ details his idea for type warnings. #

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Restartable exceptions

TL;DR: Restartable exceptions are a must for new languages & they're dead simple to implement.
A dormant LtU thread on Go's proposed panic/recover exception-like mechanism is waking up again, and I'd like to take the opportunity to evangelize restartable exceptions once again (see also my previous post What's a condition system and why do you want one?).

Especially, because this is one of the few topics where David Barbour and me are of the same opinion. :) In the thread, David presents an interesting list of Error Handling Patterns, which includes the following points (my emphasis in bold):

Exceptions

Include a non-local exit so that error-handling may be isolated upon the stack. Unfortunately, in many languages this "unwinds" the "stack", and thus a lot of important, unfinished work is simply lost, and the error-handling policy cannot effectively say anything useful about error recovery. [...]

Resumable Exceptions

The unfinished work is maintained during error handling, and there are mechanisms available to return to that work - i.e. by return value, or via 'resumption points' annotated in the code (which look the same as exception handlers). This allows a great deal of flexibility for what those error-handling policy can express, similar to the pass-a-handler approach. The greater structure, however, can lead to better performance and static analysis.

Usefully, the difference between resumable exceptions and regular exceptions only requires a very minor tweak in implementation, even in languages such as C++ and Java: handle the exception as a new activation at the top of the stack, rather than unwinding first. (These activation records would need to include a pointer to the original frame in addition to the stack pointer.) This is exactly what Dylan does.

For a practical example of restartable exceptions, check out Chris Double's A tale of restarts ('This is a "I'm glad I used Dylan" story...') and Rainer Joswig's post on LtU ("I would not want to live without that feature.").

Now, I still don't fully grok Kernel's continuation guarding ("Exception-handling 'done right'") and how it relates to restartable exceptions. This is definitely another topic John should put on his growing list of blog posts to write. :P

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Ringing in the new programming year

Straight outta Rob Pike's Command Center: Esmerelda's Imagination:
I resolve to recognize that a complaint reveals more about the complainer than the complained-about. Authority is won not by rants but by experience and insight, which require practice and imagination. And maybe some programming.
Gah. :) And Matt Might's 12 resolutions for programmers.

And don't worry, today's the most depressing day of the year, say experts.

Monday, January 2, 2012

(winningp) => t

Thank you Paul Graham for the Lisp renaissance.

Say what you like about the tenets of Lisp, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

Some signs that Lisp has now gained significant mindshare again:
  • Designers explicitly state that they won't have macros or don't have them yet: Deca, Lua
  • Languages actually do add macros: Scala, Elixir
Now the big problem is that, as they say, in CS not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes.

Let me tell you: people will spend the next 20+ years reinventing hygienic macros. (Or they could just use fexprs, and get hygiene for free.)

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Isn't goto evil?

Goto-considered-harmful-weenies (don't trust 'em) should ponder the following remark from the Novelties of Lua 5.2:
continuations are much worse

yet nobody complains; it is “cool” to support continuations
Ha!