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1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jul-2017 22:22:49 UTC Nate Cull

   I guess a type is sort of 'information about information', of a fairly limited kind, such that it can be compiled away in the best case: ie 1) if two functions were compiled by the same language and 2) we trust the compiler/linker/runtime, and 3) they exchange data (probably as a RAM pointer), then 4) we can assume that 'the data types are compatible' for some definition of compatible including type equivalence / subtyping / field-based typing.

   But across the Internet, we don't get 1, 2 or 3.

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   • Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jul-2017 22:29:54 UTC Nate Cull

     On the Internet, all you get is 1) raw bytestreams, from 2) utterly untrusted and in fact known to be hostile and lying hosts, 3) written in evil languages, and 4) you want to do far more with this data than just demonstrate 'type compatibility'. Stripping it down to the packet and surrounding metadata level, for security analysis.

     Strict abstract typing means implicit trust that another part of the program has computed data so you don't have to. That's a very rare luxury.

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   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Friday, 21-Jul-2017 01:52:13 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • PicoLisp
     • Efi 🐱
     @natecull @efi !picolisp goes against the trend and takes what you're saying to the extreme. It has dynamic scope, and `lambda` is simply an alias for `quote`.