This presentation was originally given as a lightning talk on the final day of PolyConf15 in Poznan, PL. The talk came to be as the result of a interesting lunch conversation the day before, leading to a brainstorm about a conceptual new language. The conceptual idea is to invent a new language where sharing, and thus open source, was somehow baked into the language itself. The slides contain some of the thoughts that triggered the brainstorm, and some of the properties I imagine would be useful in such a language, like a strong type-system inspired by Haskell, build in function contracts (Eiffel among others), and type providers like F#. Don't expect any answers, this was just a presentation of an interesting brainstorm, partly to present the idea itself, and partly just to celebrate the amazing brain-soup that congregates at such an event as PolyConf.

1. –Ford Prefect
“Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so”

2. Language
brainstorm
[PolyConf] -> [Lunch] -> [Crazy idea?]
Scala of Lancarrow@jankrag

3. @jankrag
What happens at PolyConf
stays at…
A lunch talk extrapolated to a brainstorm
with Korneliusz Caputa

4. @jankrag
Initial thoughts
• Much code has already been done - somewhere
• What a waste…

5. @jankrag
Initial thoughts
• At least one company has already ingested ALL
public data on GitHub for analysis
• and use it (only?) for recruitment
• … what a waste

7. @jankrag
Language where
sharing is built in

8. @jankrag
thus open source is
built in

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…the compiler
…the runtime
…or something?
To

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Discovery built into
your vIDEmacs

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Premise:
We already (mostly) trust std. libs
And have them at our fingertips
Why not more?

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So… brainstorm time

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Pure functions might
make it easier?

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Advanced type system
(like Haskell but more readable)

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Expressive,
searchable contracts

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Type providers like F#
(for IDE magic)

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Distributed runtime?

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Maybe even P2P?

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JIT function “caching” or
redistribution
• Like BitTorrent magic?
• Copy frequent functions to local runtime or at
least closer?
• If 10 people in this room are calling map, it
would be copied to one of us?
• If I use it a lot, I might get local version?

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Challenges?

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Performance
especially if distributed runtime

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Security, obviously

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Naah, that
shouldn’t stop a
good idea :-)

25. @jankragmake it happen?
Shoot
Think
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