900 karma · joined June 17, 2022
I want a new language because current GPU (and really, parallel programming) languages are just not it. Also, I think we'd be better off if it weren't just CUDA dominating the developer experience.
Moreover, I feel that we should be embracing advanced type systems with AI. The past couple decades have shown that people do want advanced typing even without AI. And now we have stuff like "Lean is faster than Rust" (https://kim-em.github.io/blog/2026-7-24-why-lean-is-faster-t...).
Programming is hard. Programming when you can't just rely on the classic RAM model is harder. Parallel programming at scale on vector processors with small amounts of cache (and slow cache at that) is even harder. We can do better. Rust has already shown this for normal systems programming.
Typechecking with my own algorithm. Simple enough to specify in Python. Annoying with much boilerplate in CUDA. Similarly annoying to test.
Taste is disagreeable.
Maybe Claude should not let me build a two-level type theory with just a "You're absolutely right!". In fact, now it will say "You're absolutely right, and it would be so amazing to use cubical types for blah blah", and adamantly defend it with several paragraphs of vomit.
Also, consider this: it would have been trivial to get a so-called "better bound" on FFT if such a "cheat" were what people allowed.
The good news is that wikipedia has very good (and simple) figures for the shape of the force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_force
Whatever moves people, however people wish to express themselves, whatever people find beautiful, all that is "art" to me. There's much which is art to others, perhaps, that I would not understand as art for myself.
"Art is something done with the purpose of exploring emotions, aesthetic beauty, question societal norms, etc." I apologize if my emotions and aesthetics are not communicated, but I can only say that they were there. As for societal norms, I doubt that "embedding digital logic in types" is a "norm" of the programming society.
And though it's an appeal to patterns, I will have to bring up the general repeated failure of humanity to recognize art.
Later, I learned some typelevel programming (in Scala), and by encoding a digital (binary) adder and multiplier at the type level, I showed -- at least to myself -- it was possible to compute and check linear algebra shapes at compile time (without a compiler plugin). It was rather magical and funny to think that I just embedded basic digital logic in such a higher-abstraction world.
It was slow for the inputs I cared about, so I added some optimizations, like an if-statement at the type level, for example, so that it bit-shift for multiplying powers of 2 (multiplication for tensor products). The compile time difference being palpable was a testament to how "some 'ideas' are surprisingly close to others" (err, 'ideas' ~ 'numbers' in this case). There is a connection to the p-adic numbers here, courtesy of dyadics, and some connection to the more-natural "last-mile" problem.
It's not REST, maybe. But I felt it was magical.
I sometimes tell people of when I came down from Mt. Fuji, there were wispy clouds and grand nature below me, picturesque like a painting. At that time, I likened it to the beauty I felt when I was first learning Haskell. But I say it because I expect it to be a rare kind of sentiment.
The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate, and the appreciation grows deeper with more consideration. I love reading the placards in museums and attempting to understand why the artist did what they did, I like it more than even looking at the piece itself.
Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.
As a consumer of graphics and music, let me "agree" for just a moment. I might not care how the music or image came to me. I just care that I like the final product. Which is why most paintings are trash, because I prefer highly saturated colors.
...I suppose this is somewhat true of many people already.