Programming Paradigms

Scott Wlaschin gives popular talks. This one is on Pipeline-oriented programming, given at NDC in 2023:

This stuff is actually complete rocket science, otherwise people at Google would know how to use it to design decent apps. Since people at Google can not design decent apps, ...

My comment:

15:36 Great to see Microsoft doing all it can to uphold Murphy's law! 22:38 🤣

His laptop was only displaying PowerPoint slides, but it crashed twice. Seems Microsoft can't design software either. 

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We don't need programming paradigms, we need effective methods for programming computers. There is a massive inefficiency in all modern software systems which people don't even seem to be able to see because it is so entrenched in the way programming languages and operating systems work. This inefficiency is also a major source of security vulnerabilities, so there is a lot to gain by not doing it. Most of the time most of what a computer does is just deconstructing one data representation, which is the input, and constructing another different one representing the output. Every single step in the pipelines that are constructed in this talk involves dismantling an input structure and constructing an output structure which must then immediately be dismantled again by the next stage. Instead we should be composing the processes themselves as running machine code. After building such a pipeline the result should not be an interpreted function which calls each stage in turn, which deconstruct representations received from OS sockets and construct representations that are sent out on other sockets, with the garbage collector running every now and then. Instead it should be a set of hardware DMA channels and interrupt service routines which implement the whole network of pipelines comprising the application. No operating system, no filesystem, no libraries, just highly efficient fail-safe machine code loaded from a non-volatile memory in a few milliseconds and never changing more than once every few years. See Thorsten Altenkirch on NaÏve Type Theory and An Interesting and Useful Duality.

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