Last couple weeks I've been building a new website to showcase the document formatting capabilities of my programming language Mech. It's out now: https://mech-lang.org/post/2026-05-11-version-0.3/ Mech has a builtin…
lol that's funny, I have been working seriously [1] on a feature like this after first writing about it jokingly [2] earlier this year. The joke was the assistant is a cat who is constantly sabotaging you, and you have…
I think that's exactly what is meant, and it's a great example. The two places where literate programming have shined most are 1) documentation because it's a natural fit there and you can get away with having little…
I agree with this. I've been a fan of literate programming for a long time, I just think it is a really nice mode of development, but since its inception it hasn't lived up to its promise because the tooling around the…
I remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch…
Contemporary PL designers who have inspired my programming language design journey the most are people like Chris Granger (Eve), Jamie Brandon (Eve/Imp/others), Bret Victor (Dynamicland), Chris Lattner (Swift / Mojo),…
Thanks for the kind words and keeping the joke going, I laughed at many of these responses. I think they'll make it in to v2.0 which should be out by 4/1 It makes sense that the first thing I'd get to the front page of…
You might be interested in following my project, as I'm trying to support exactly that nexus of features for those applications! https://github.com/mech-lang/mech…
I think it's the exact opposite -- LLMs have revealed the precise utility of programming languages. For decades the "English as programming language" has been the holy grail of language designers. From COBOL to SQL to…
> this sounds more like an artsclass to me. Indeed, it is, and that's the point! Being interfaces to computers for humans, programming languages sit at the intersection of computer science and humanities. Lots of people…
I know about this one as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1ioij... but the author seems to have taken it private for now. I think he's the Gren author, which is a fork of Elm. As for me, I…
I worked on this project so I can give some insight. The main reason we didn't keep working on it was it was VC funded and we didn't have a model for making money in the short term. At the end we were pursuing research…
You just have to look at the landscape at the time. There was a lot of money to be had if you promised the sun and moon, because $2 million wasn't a lot compared to the potential upside. The problem was, and this is…
Congrats on Dark for making it this far! Relevent timeline: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019) https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to…
Haha yeah! When I was a kid before we could afford a computer, I would type magazine programs out on a type writer. I remember that I had to keep starting over because I would make a mistake, but that was okay because…
Lol this was my favorite thing to do at CMU. Except it wasn't luxury goods, it was all the textbooks and computer equipment they would leave behind.
Science absolutely depends on people meeting and exchanging ideas. Whether that happens at a conference as they exist today is one thing, but if you don't spend money on getting people from around the world to meet and…
> for all intents and purposes What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay…
That's an interesting counterfactual but it doesn't really mean much to reality. Fact is, what happened is that public research got the results where private industry did not, and everyone is better for it, including…
> If the OP's specific research was into The Changing Mating Habits of the Delta Smelt Due to Habit Destruction, then probably it was money that could far better spent paying tuition for, say, medical students or even…
The charge is that Tesla can't do self-driving successfully. If they could, you wouldn't need to supervise, as is the case with e.g. a Waymo taxi. That they require you to supervise is an admission that their system is…
If that's how you're using it, then you're doing it wrong, because you're supposed to be supervising the drive the entire time. It's not self-driving if you're supervising. And you're required to supervise because...…
Please read my sibling reply about DARPA grand challenges. This knowledge was built using public dollars by people who publish papers, which are being read today by people building products. That's the great cycle of…
Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for…
Thank will follow along with great interest!
Last couple weeks I've been building a new website to showcase the document formatting capabilities of my programming language Mech. It's out now: https://mech-lang.org/post/2026-05-11-version-0.3/ Mech has a builtin…
lol that's funny, I have been working seriously [1] on a feature like this after first writing about it jokingly [2] earlier this year. The joke was the assistant is a cat who is constantly sabotaging you, and you have…
I think that's exactly what is meant, and it's a great example. The two places where literate programming have shined most are 1) documentation because it's a natural fit there and you can get away with having little…
I agree with this. I've been a fan of literate programming for a long time, I just think it is a really nice mode of development, but since its inception it hasn't lived up to its promise because the tooling around the…
I remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch…
Contemporary PL designers who have inspired my programming language design journey the most are people like Chris Granger (Eve), Jamie Brandon (Eve/Imp/others), Bret Victor (Dynamicland), Chris Lattner (Swift / Mojo),…
Thanks for the kind words and keeping the joke going, I laughed at many of these responses. I think they'll make it in to v2.0 which should be out by 4/1 It makes sense that the first thing I'd get to the front page of…
You might be interested in following my project, as I'm trying to support exactly that nexus of features for those applications! https://github.com/mech-lang/mech…
I think it's the exact opposite -- LLMs have revealed the precise utility of programming languages. For decades the "English as programming language" has been the holy grail of language designers. From COBOL to SQL to…
> this sounds more like an artsclass to me. Indeed, it is, and that's the point! Being interfaces to computers for humans, programming languages sit at the intersection of computer science and humanities. Lots of people…
I know about this one as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1ioij... but the author seems to have taken it private for now. I think he's the Gren author, which is a fork of Elm. As for me, I…
I worked on this project so I can give some insight. The main reason we didn't keep working on it was it was VC funded and we didn't have a model for making money in the short term. At the end we were pursuing research…
You just have to look at the landscape at the time. There was a lot of money to be had if you promised the sun and moon, because $2 million wasn't a lot compared to the potential upside. The problem was, and this is…
Congrats on Dark for making it this far! Relevent timeline: https://blog.darklang.com/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-financ... (2019) https://blog.darklang.com/dark-and-the-long-term/ (2020 - in which the team is fired to…
Haha yeah! When I was a kid before we could afford a computer, I would type magazine programs out on a type writer. I remember that I had to keep starting over because I would make a mistake, but that was okay because…
Lol this was my favorite thing to do at CMU. Except it wasn't luxury goods, it was all the textbooks and computer equipment they would leave behind.
Science absolutely depends on people meeting and exchanging ideas. Whether that happens at a conference as they exist today is one thing, but if you don't spend money on getting people from around the world to meet and…
> for all intents and purposes What you mean is for your intents and purposes. Others in the thread have pointed out specific intents and purposes for which Tesla's approach fails -- driving when you don't have to pay…
That's an interesting counterfactual but it doesn't really mean much to reality. Fact is, what happened is that public research got the results where private industry did not, and everyone is better for it, including…
> If the OP's specific research was into The Changing Mating Habits of the Delta Smelt Due to Habit Destruction, then probably it was money that could far better spent paying tuition for, say, medical students or even…
The charge is that Tesla can't do self-driving successfully. If they could, you wouldn't need to supervise, as is the case with e.g. a Waymo taxi. That they require you to supervise is an admission that their system is…
If that's how you're using it, then you're doing it wrong, because you're supposed to be supervising the drive the entire time. It's not self-driving if you're supervising. And you're required to supervise because...…
Please read my sibling reply about DARPA grand challenges. This knowledge was built using public dollars by people who publish papers, which are being read today by people building products. That's the great cycle of…
Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for…
Thank will follow along with great interest!