samir, a terminally deprecated methodAn idea that may or may not be terrible, written down so I can get it out of my head and into someone who can do something about it.
What if we started from scratch with code represented as graphs, not text?
Rob@samir I don't think this proposal is a stable point in a design space — as long as medium and short term storage and communication protocols are both oriented around sequences of bytes, I'd posit that something like a text editor is going to be the most stable way to ensure that data is interpretable by humans in different systems.
also, the system you imagine is almost certainly best prototyped as "encode the graphs as pick-your-own-serialization-format and encode the graph that way."
@simrob I think you’re right. Perhaps making a typed graph transfer format/protocol would be a better starting point!
Irenes (many)this is where we went with our version of it also
which brings you back to the self-describing data problem. the challenge there is that essentially the same thing keeps getting reinvented every five to ten years with superficial changes, which suggests to us that it's solving the wrong problem. we think the right problem is schema formats, the part everyone punts on
@samir @simrob (and it's dependently typed because we've evaluated a lot of schema formats, and basically everyone wants to add idiom features on a case by case basis hoping to keep it small while still meeting everyone's needs, and they universally fail to do either of those things, so we'd rather go straight to Turing-completeness in a deliberate way rather than an accidental one)
@ireneista @simrob There is so much right about this that I don't know where to start.
The only worry I have is that it sounds hard for someone else to create a competing implementation, and I think that we need more of that from our protocols (and our compilers).
Regardless, if you ever get the time and energy to write it up, I would really love to read more about it!
@ireneista @simrob *smashes the Subscribe button*