chrisdone

7 ms·

1.
by chrisdone 5y ago
The Economist stylized this as “tweets are appraised as speech, but punished as writing.”
2.
by chrisdone 5y ago
I’m working on https://inflex.io/ which can achieve the data / logic separation of Improv, by putting functions in cells. But Improv isn’t an inspiration. Inflex is certainly closer to it than Airtable though.
3.
by chrisdone 5y ago
I mean if the value is imported as a decimal, then a sort by that field will sort as decimal. This might not be obvious if a system imports 23.53, 53.98 etc - a user would think it looks good. It only becomes clear that it was an error to i
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by chrisdone 5y ago
That’s a shrewd observation. Static types help with this somewhat. E.g. in Inflex, if I import some CSV and the string “00.10” as 0.1, then later when you try to do work on it like x == “00.10” You’ll get a type error that x is a decimal an
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by chrisdone 5y ago
I see that it supports units in terms of scale - does it also prevent units that measure different things from being combined? E.g. 2 kg + 3cm (units mismatch) or 3$ * 7$ (two monies can’t be multiplied).
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by chrisdone 5y ago
Airtable is strongly typed in the fields of the tables, but the expression language is not. It is my conclusion based on researching Airtable, that the decision to have well typed tables is so that relational operations work nicely, and so
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by chrisdone 5y ago
I commented elsewhere in this submission that I am working on a strongly typed spreadsheet. (Don’t want to spam my product link.) I do think that bringing new syntax to the table is justifiable if it brings new concepts with it. I agree, po
8.
by chrisdone 5y ago
I am working on a product which is pretty much exactly what you describe. I love spreadsheets but I wanted something that I wanted to actually program in right from the beginning to the end of my work process. It’s called Inflex: https:&#x
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by chrisdone 5y ago
I like your work on Mito, and I feel like it’s the python answer to a project that I’m working on which is the equivalent but with Haskell, or rather a riff on Haskell to be more amenable to spreadsheets-like programming. One thing that you
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by chrisdone 5y ago
SPJ has been coming at this from the angle of let’s add things to Excel because Excel itself is already established. This, in my opinion, is putting lipstick on a pig. The inputs and outputs work represents a very stretched contortion of tr
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by chrisdone 6y ago
It’s my understanding that the main selling feature of AirTable is the hard coded views that they offer; calendars, kanban style planners, things like that. The slightly more structured nature of relational tables over spreadsheets lets you
12.
by chrisdone 6y ago
> but waiting 5 minutes for a vlookup against a few hundred thousand records to complete because I need one single column in another sheet is maddening when it would take nearly no time at all if I loaded the data into Python -> Panda
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by chrisdone 6y ago
I’m working on a (very beta) product that hopes to address a subset of your complaints about spreadsheets. https://inflex.io/ Based on your phrasing you might have already heard of it. In particular my two blog posts mirror
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by chrisdone 6y ago
Someone said the problem of WhatsApp is network effects. Network effects are fine. Email benefits from network effects. The difference is that email is designed to be decentralized and from the beginning had many clients with open protocols
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by chrisdone 6y ago
Not that, but Unison is one direct inspiration. I wrote a small overview here https://community.inflex.io/t/the-inflex-language/20
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by chrisdone 6y ago
A paper that profoundly influenced my language design: “Programming with Polymorphic Variants” https://caml.inria.fr/pub/papers/garrigue-polymorphic_varian... And the earlier paper “A Polymorphic Type System for E
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by chrisdone 6y ago
That may be a cultural difference. You may see the EU as having a "very lax work ethic", but in my experience working in the EU, they see America (and Britain) as having an unhealthy work obsession. (Work to live vs live to work,
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by chrisdone 6y ago
The recent Unison language uses the effect system described in the Frank language https://www.unisonweb.org/
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by chrisdone 6y ago
I agree. I read the same passage and had the same complaint. I just finished a Great Courses lecture series on the Norman conquest of England, and the professor makes this very comment. And also argues that the melding of Norman--not '
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by chrisdone 6y ago
There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach
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by chrisdone 6y ago
Reiki does not involve touch.
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by chrisdone 6y ago
"Consistent at creation" is also known in the Haskell community by the phrase "make illegal states unrepresentable".
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by chrisdone 7y ago
I think Decision Fatigue has a long and rich treatment in the Buddhist and specifically Zen tradition. One of the true practical daily takeaways from Zen teachings I can share is that dithering and hesitation are acute forms of suffering an
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by chrisdone 7y ago
That's an interesting angle. Another way of saying it might be that GoDP on the face of it can make one-off proofs for a value. Proofs for a function requires making proofs about all possible inputs, which is where your property test c
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by chrisdone 7y ago
Techniques like Ghost of Departed Proofs are the most exciting thing to me as a casual correctness enthusiast. It acts as a means of combining static types with contracts. Types are sound mostly because they are a stupid mini language, so e
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by chrisdone 7y ago
My email server (@chrisdone.com) has been running for a year and a half and is written in Haskell, saves all mail into a postgresql database, has a web interface and an Emacs interface. https://github.com/chrisdone/duta
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by chrisdone 7y ago
Ghost of Departed proofs provides a fairly trivial way to generate proofs from arbitrary code and track them in the type system. See this article for example: https://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2019-08-09-who-autho
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by chrisdone 7y ago
I think physical comedy just has a broader audience, which worked well in silent movies and thereafter. The broadness is also why it’s considered cheap and used sparingly. It’s like shouting. As Friends went on and the writing got lazier ev
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by chrisdone 7y ago
Fat clients of all kinds (cryptocurrency wallets, medical devices, data analysis, log viewers, etc.), depends on the client.
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by chrisdone 7y ago
After our bad experience in 2016 using GHCJS on a big project, we haven't considered it for anything since. Anything that arrived after that related to GHCJS just hasn't been on my radar ("a history of my own experience in th

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