Hacker News Reader

Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

Hi Jonathan, "Subtext 3 and 4 were successive experiments in a new semantics of mutable state I describe as synchronously updateable views." What does this mean? Is Chorus a database?

edit: the answer from his paper: "Typical applications are built from at least three distinct technology stacks: a database, a programming language, and a UI framework. Each of these technologies has its own semantics, and much of the complexity of application programming stems from the need to glue them together. Chorus instead provides a single unified model built upon our prior work on Subtext (Edwards 2004-2014). Our statically typed tree structures are effectively databases: the types are schemas, collections serve as tables, and references serve as relationships. All data is persistent, and all execution is performed in concurrent transactions."

View on HN

I think there are videos and code for Subtext (or an earlier version of Subtext) ; I would recommend you watch all videos by Jonathan; they are good.

I found https://vimeo.com/jonathoda

Do you know of others?

Check out this page; http://www.subtext-lang.org/

Together with Brett Victor his Inventing on Principle, I usually show this https://vimeo.com/140738254 to people when explaining my daily existence and the unfairness of it (as in; some of us have these ideas and yet, my CPU cores + memory are overloaded doing trivial db queries to do code completion and rendering HTML because that is what we write GUI's including code editors in now :).

I sympathize with the frustration! It's debilitating to know that there is a better way to program something yet you can't use it because it hasn't been implemented yet. I mitigate the pain by spending some time every week working on my own ideas of how computers / programming should work. Some of these ideas are very similar (at first glance) to subtext / chorus. I knew I couldn't be the only one thinking like that.

I love programming with computers still (and have so for the past 34 years); the ideas set forward in these videos and implementations do give the feeling we might get somewhere. I myself only write tools for specific projects. I hope I get a chance of distilling something more generic from that some day but that might be simply too hard. As for Alarming Development, I much liked Subtext & Coherence (where did that site go? [0]); from what I have seen Chorus is a more high level approach and very curious to try that out even though we have not seen much yet.

[0] https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20130810132017/coherence-la...

Keep working on your ideas and try to communicate them to others. If we all refuse to give up someday we will make programming not suck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com