Flare will be the first annotative programming language. Annotative programming, if done properly, has the potential to be the successor to object-oriented programming, in the same way that object-oriented programming succeeded procedural programming, procedural programming succeeded assembly language, and assembly language succeeded raw hexadecimal numbers
Runic, April 27, 2016, 04:30:55 pm
This is one of my favorite things Yud produced. It's a fractal of stupidity.
Zekka, April 27, 2016, 09:43:49 pm
Have you seen his design doc for Flare? It's fucking amazing. In it he seriously ponders how long it will be before Flare supplants Java and Python entirely, and under what circumstances the Linux Kernal will be ported to Flare. It's think of transcendent beauty.
Runic, April 28, 2016, 12:13:24 am
I effectively MSTed it a while back for SomethingAwful's Yudkowsky thread. It's not a unique kind of hubris and it's really similar to my hubris when I worked on my first programming languages project -- I wasn't marveling at how people I don't even know would sit down and using it, but I thought I was legitimately doing something novel and interesting, just because I didn't think anyone else had gone through the same series of ideas and refinements that ended up at my design.
Yud seems to feel the same way. However, it turns out everything can be specified as a generalization or a broadening of something else so you can't actually
do anything novel. Besides that, being novel specifically isn't really a design goal for real systems that actually succeed, as far as I can tell.
The reason he didn't ever seem to be able to figure this out is that he doesn't know anything about theory. You can pick any paragraph and it's full of major factual errors. And since he only really knows Python, and he's super narcissistic, he doesn't see everything everyone else has done that hangs over into the area he's working in. (Flare is basically a tiny-ass subset of what you can do with any row-based language like Prolog.) Add to that that he's willing to treat all the things he doesn't know anything about as probably pretty easy to do -- which is a convenient excuse for all the problems his idea has nothing to do with.
In other words, he's an engineer except he has no engineering skills.
Oh yeah, and his idea of "I've succeeded" is "Other people like me." not "I did a good job" so he just fantasizes about important people using his project and telling him he's important. That's kind of sad imho but also funny.