Bad Smells In Our Programming Workflow
2025-06-02
Something about the programming workflow smells bad to me.
I'm currently thinking (aka "strongly believe") that FP (Functional Programming) should be violently separated from control flow and mutation, etc.
Lua is 12,000x larger than Sector Lisp. Everything else is even way larger.
I think that that kind of bloat comes from trying to force FP to be a GPL (General Purpose programming Language).
I tend to think of FP as being Sector Lisp. Control Flow to be StateCharts and parallelism (my PBP (0D) stuff). I.E. FP is completely orthogonal to Control Flow and completely orthogonal to parallelism. I tend to think in terms of NO GPLs whatsoever, but a workflow that includes MANY little PLs ("SCNs") that compose to make a program. I think that the result would be many times smaller than what we have now.
Hence, pondering of things like sheet music to see it simplifies control flow-y aspects of thinking. I imagine that if we flipped and tried to force music scores to become GPLs, we'd get something so complicated that 5 year-olds would no longer be able to understand...
See Also
Email: ptcomputingsimplicity@gmail.com
References: https://guitarvydas.github.io/2024/01/06/References.html
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My dad grew up on a farm. He rode around on a tractor with his dad, starting at a very young age. My dad worked in an office trading stocks. I had no idea what he did. I work on a computer. My three year has no idea what I do. It would be amazing if there were some way for a 5 year old to understand what the adults were up to, instead of just seeing their faces glued to screens all day :(