Mastodawn

re: https://hci.social/@chrisamaphone/116325060049701188

taking off my "impartial observer" hat for a moment (and so breaking out of the thread), one opinion i've started solidifying is that we need stable (or one might say "archival") proof languages, alongside those that actively evolve. a big motivation for me is to develop teaching materials that still run in a decade (Explaining), but i think there are good Convincing-aligned reasons to want this as well.

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chris martens 19h ago

arguably we should also want archival programming languages more generally. sometimes, a language whose features cease to evolve is called "dead". but perhaps we should reserve "dead" for languages whose programs no longer run, and use "archival" for those whose implementations are maintained while their feature sets remain stable (thx @simrob for planting this lexical seed in my head)

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deech

@chrisamaphone @simrob In the case of non-mainstream languages for it to be archival there needs to be a reliable bootstrapping story that starts with some mainstream language (edit: ideally with multiple implementations).