Post by @freakazoid@retro.social

Please help me find or figure out how to build this thing. Spritely probably comes damn close, but I am not convinced a lisp is the right base. I like mutable value semantics. But at the same time, "software built to last" and "new shiny thing" aren't necessarily compatible with one another.

https://retro.social/@freakazoid/116891116516428939

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 4 hours ago

@mos_8502 Right now it feels like I'm trying to build furniture in a house that's steadily crumbling around me.

I would love to find tools and a platform that will actually last. Which maybe means a VM of some kind?

Luna Dragofelis ΘΔ🏳️‍⚧️🐱

@LunaDragofelis@void.lgbt 2 hours ago

@freakazoid Both Scheme and Common Lisp support mutable value semantics, at least for records and objects. And the Common Lisp spec has barely been touched since the 90s, apparently it's so flexible using features like macros, that new stuff could be added through libraries without needing to change the core language. Which is what I aim to achieve with Kittyscript too.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hours ago

@LunaDragofelis Yeah the lisps are very tempting. But there appears to be a significant fraction of the population who will simply never touch them no matter what. I'm not sure it's more true of lisps than for any other specific language one could come up with, but I do think its lack of syntax actually does make it harder for humans to parse.

Luna Dragofelis ΘΔ🏳️‍⚧️🐱

@LunaDragofelis@void.lgbt 2 hours ago

@freakazoid It's definitely possible to use alternative textual syntaxes that get parsed to S-Expressions behind the scenes. One just needs to switch out or extend the "reader" (for example with a reader macro).

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hours ago

@LunaDragofelis I'm aware. But now you've introduced additional complexity and magic just so you can keep using a particular technology under the hood that was originally intended for humans to program directly. It's fine if you're just prototyping new languages in Racket, but I'm not aware of any production programming system that works this way whose primary goal isn't interoperability with some existing Lisp codebase.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 3 hours ago

Other things I love: emacs and uxn. But emacs is not very accessible to people, and uxn is too limited.

I don't think it's just about the practice. We're not going to resurrect the art of building software through sheer force of will. We have to change the landscape. We need to build things for building things.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hours ago

The reason I used the term "VM" in my original reply is because modern computers and operating systems suck, programming them sucks, and not everyone has the same kind. I want to be able to enjoy making software, and I want people to be able to use it no matter what platform they're on, including their phone.

That means the lowest common denominator is Safari on iOS, because nothing can sap one's desire to build things like trying to get something into the App Store, and that's the only other option if you want to support iOS.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hours ago

And if you need to support browsers you're talking about WASM or JS. And you can't make a JIT in WASM, though you can build new modules and "link" them in on the fly.

Then how do you manage networking and storage? P2P is not impossible in the browser, but it's very difficult, especially if the browser might also be behind symmetric NAT. Or you just have to accept that you'll need relay infrastructure. Libp2p is probably the most mature here, though only the JS version. And you have JS in the browser, but do you really want to rely on a JS VM on desktop as well?

There are other options, but they either lack any existing relay infrastructure in the case of Iroh, nostr, and webtorrent or lack WSS or WebTransport infrastructure in the case of Veilid. Tor has Snowflake but only 2 bridges and it's slow and unreliable. Direct support for WSS and/or WebTransport would be fantastic, but it doesn't seem to be on their roadmap.

Charles U. Farley

@freakazoid@retro.social 2 hours ago

So, yeah, probably forget p2p, as tempting as it is. But federated systems create landlords. And as we all know landlords are bad.

I like the idea of a simple headless server (I call it a "brick") people can stick on their network, but unless they can also forward a port on their firewall it has many of the same problems as p2p in the browser.

Dumping the browser and thus iOS support may be the best compromise.