On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Matt Oliveri <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:33 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]> > wrote: > > The thing I think you'll end up migrating to is more like what I have > in mind, where BitC would be a library for an extensible language. > Luckily you don't have to plan for that at all. ("Luckily" is kind of > joking. The ease of accommodating extensions would be deliberate.) I'm not sure what you mean by "extension". But I think this is not a focus for BitC right now. I do want to look at mixfix-based extensions. I'm not very focused at the moment on type-level extensions. Partly because I'm not focused on proof issues. BitC *will* have a subset language that is a pure term language. That may be helpful for some things both now and later, but it's really too early to tell. I think we don't have a lot of experience with HM-style languages that also address systems needs. I think we need to have at least one experiment - even a failed experiment - before we take more steps. Ideally more than one. > > The world doesn't move in leaps. It moves in steps. > > I wish you hadn't said that. I disagree with the general statement > that there are no leaps forward, but it isn't really relevant because > that doesn't preclude smaller steps forward. (Oops, I assumed you > meant forward. :)) I am reminded of a slide that Nick Trednick was fond of. Dot in the center, vectors out from the dot in every direction. Arrow left to right at the bottom of the slide labeled "Progress". But if you're paying attention you realize the vectors sum to zero... Things that look like big leaps are often the accumulation of small increments. I actually believe that there *are* examples of big leaps, but the larger the community that has to buy in the harder that is to do. Change in very large doses is really hard for most people to take in. shap
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