Daimio: a language for sharingΒΆ
| Authors: | dann toliver |
|---|---|
| Time: | 9:40 - 10:10 |
| Session: | https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/daimio-a-language-for-sharing |
| Link: | http://daimio.org |
| Slides: |
“Make your applications programmable”
As we increasingly use web applications for everything – bug tracking, etc – it’s becoming more obvious when we don’t use them. Like code editing, because your editor is probably totally customized and tricked out. For those of us building web applications, people are probably using them in ways that you didn’t intend. It’d be great if we could allow our users to extend and customize our applications, and share that, without exposing ourselves to rampant attack, or endangering our users.
So what would an appropriate language look like? It’d have editable interfaces, extensible functionality, and expressible interaction.
When it comes to interfaces, we’ll need a templating language that allows for some sort of code embedding (to avoid C-style printf, if nothing else), some control structures, and most importantly, is side effect free.
We’d need a composition and coordination language, as well – the ability to apply primative operations to one another to build up larger functionality. [Presenter strongly prefers data flow languages for things like this.] When it comes to coordination, we need modularity, with some limits on the how entwined and tightly couple components can become.
So what might it look like if we combined a few of these features, what might that look like?
Well it’s a data flow language, so that means pipes. And it uses a directed acyclic graph, which means you need a way to do static single assignment.
{ 3 | add 5 } ==> 8
For expressible interactions, we need some coordination language model. We’re interested in building graphical interfaces, so we can assume that coordination is happening on a single machine, which removes a bunch of possible problems (network variability, etc).
State is stored in “spaces”, and spaces can have subspaces [I think?]. So where does code live in this model, since it co-exists with data? Code has a thin wrapper called a station, and can be connected to other spaces.
To avoid side effects, we push all of the I/O to “ports” on the outermost space.
[Code examples]