Stop Writing Dead Programs
summary
Thesis: stop writing dead programs and instead build live programming environments that keep state and give immediate feedback. Concrete examples include a ClojureScript hack called cells and a notebook port Clerk that produces better error messages and is used for teaching. Historical specifics motivate it: 80‑column punchcards and a VAX with 16 MB and 5 MHz. Alternatives that work now: Erlang-style live runtimes, Smalltalk object browsers, propagators and dataflow visualizers like Data Rabbit and Hest that actually run and reveal state.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 4:20Batch Processing
- 7:16Arm64
- 16:54Program Representation
- 20:24The Visual Cortex
- 22:49Pragmatics
- 23:58Lisp
- 24:37Types
- 27:00Design Discipline
- 27:53Debugging
- 31:41Fast Compiler
- 32:42Batch Mode
- 35:25Future Directions
- 39:52Other Projects
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