Comment : on Aesthetics in Programming Language Design

 ( link ) 

I view it as a [human-computer interaction] / industrial design / civil architecture problem.

( Caveat : links I posted are mostly just my own desk study notes which are messy. )

I'm designing a tooling language, myself. I am still spending most of my time on the architecture from lexeme design to memory layout, than doing any coding.

1. The most fun part is comparative history of PLs. You can see which trope comes from which origin. Every operator, conventional name for a mechanism, and decision of implicit/explicit control has a genealogy. It's basically philology for PL.

2. The three main layers for me to encapsulate are

• formal grammar : universe of UI

• IR : hardware independent description of language semantics

• implementations

Formal grammars are the cosmetic differences which casual users think of as "the language" and so the toolchain I want is something where I can change the formal grammar, and see the implications it has on difficulty to compile to IR, as well as downstream effect on specific architectures under different compile time and runtime situations (small vs big code base, few vs many contributors etc.)

I am incredibly annoyed that there is not one IR standard for information interchange 'IRSII' , and so this is the one of the things I think about with every design decision. "How is X done in each of the N other languages I already know how to use?" Anyway, all design decisions about language semantics basically filter down to some sort of IRSII, which can represent any computing idiom, and the language designer just uses it to express what they dis/allow their language to do. This is where decisions about type systems, and object paradigms, and guarantees of all sorts for safety, concurrency, performance, and ergonomics, come in.

Finally the harder CPU sequencing and memory layout stuff. For ease of headspace, as a hobbyist with limited resources, I just think about how to implement it on a VM, using a simplified model of where registers, cache, stack, heap, and how memory is de/allocated. Because I am very poor, and noob, it is useful to target JS first, with a view to do other backends later.

Rough epistemic model

 Rough epistemic model : 

• 1. Truth, to an individual human, is a hormonal cascade which stabilises a neural holding pattern, and subsequently a broader physiological holding pattern, associated with positive well-being ( 'pleasure' ). 
• 1.1. It results from recognition of semantic coherence, between the expectation of what a sign means, and the reified discovery of what a sign means. ( Phew, anxiety alleviated, risk-off, etc. )
• 2. Truth, to groups of humans, is determined by the establishment of semantic coherence in communication within the group, synchronising each individual's notion (1.) of truth.
• 3. Truth, to an anthropomorphic machine, is a model of (1.)

Sometimes the discipline of maths is stupid.

Today's research into the historical and contemporary use of [proof assistants] and [automated theorem provers] is a sobering reminder of certain idiocies which annoyed me as an undergraduate :

• 1. many professional mathematicians are not practitioners of formal mathematics - this may not be news for many, but it was certainly an irritating discovery for me  back in the day ( and it remains irritating to be reminded of this today )
• 2. the entire concept of relying on intuition and a closed community-of-the-intuitively-attuned to uphold norms of any sort, let alone scientific norms, is just ass-backwards and needs to die; or you know, it should be made explicit who is a low-context/explicit mathematician, and who is a high-context/intuitive mathematician, so that others can pick their associations, pedagogical paths, and strategise about any other work appropriately

I am happy with my decision at the time to set all of this aside, and to focus the first part of my career on accumulating other knowledge. Now the time has come for me to do the harder work. Hopefully something will come of it, which I will be happier with, than I am with the state of the world as it is.