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Comment by BulgarianIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. We need RECURSIVE DIVISION of compute/state entities.

Our main mistake is that we invent a level of division, and never make it recursive, i.e. a class is badly designed to be an entire module, it can't contain classes (inner Java classes are not what I'm talking about), nor can classes cross machine boundaries easily in many languages and so on.

We need a unit of division that works across machines just as well as it works across files, or across statements in the same file, up from data centers to CPU instructions.

Our languages and platforms are full of the SAME THING but SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, under DIFFERENT NAMES. You listed many of them. Machine opcode, expression, function, class, module, service etc.

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Modules are recursive. Libraries are recursive. Hell, functions and classes are recursive too. I don't think we have any non-recursive code abstraction tool.

Some of the problem is that people need different capabilities from different abstraction layers. The rest of the problem is that there are a lot of incompetent people creating software.

If you start listing what different capabilities you need on each layer, you'll notice it can all be done, as a very lean abstraction, in one layer. I'm working on creating a platform that's doing just that, BTW.

I'll cite Erlang as an example that comes somewhat close to what I mean. An Erlang process is a function, a class, a module, and a remote service, all at once. It can be done. We just never stopped to truly think about it and try.

> We just never stopped to truly think about it and try.

Oh, you are right about this. But a lot of people stopped to think about it. It always seemed to fail due to market failures, like most other innovations in development.

Yes, the network effects of pre-existing platforms are big. But we should keep trying I think. I think such a platform should also be inclusive enough hat it can act as a glue layer for and INSIDE existing platforms, but have richer semantics than say JSON, Protobuff or similar protocols offer.

> I don't think we have any non-recursive code abstraction tool.

Mircoservices, Projects in a monorepo, Infrastructure as code, ...

Sometimes they don't even have abstractions at all.

And there are whole companies being built to make these things even remotely managable.

You might become interested in actor systems.

What's the correct level of division?

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