Gathering to discuss the main question & to publish a more deep introduction (aka propaedeutics) into the project

[Anton-Latukha]

Preamble

Working on the project, decided that did enough learning of it through the code reading/refactoring. I did enough of it to get an understanding of a whole project and approached some additional deeper understanding boundary, there are information & scope of questions that only John can cover.

There are hard programming themes in the project, that have a deep vast impact on the project, in particular: laziness, recursive schemes, abstracting definitional interpreters - these are the main & advanced programming paradigms the project is built on and they form the design, code, compilation & execution of the project

Questions

Questions that see particularly beneficial to ask:

• History: How long you did what and volume of effort HNix took. How long it took to study/implement topics/parts & properties of the system.
• Shortcomings in/of the design he knows of or think of as important to solve upfront.
• Thoughts on the idea to migrate HNix to recursion-schemes library.
  • Thoughts on the current code (considering there were no changes to the recursion schemes part of it).
  • The desired scope of recursion schemes application in the code.
  • Maybe look particularly into Utils.Fix1T & Value and give thoughts on how to put them more classically-defaulty/migrate them to recursion-schemes.
• Abstracting Definitional Interpreters brief.
  • Consequences of the use of the ADI on HNix.
    • Assumption of the scope it currently works at (considering there were no changes to it):
• What companies you know that use Nix and do they use Haskell. (It is of personal interest, since looking for a place to work at, but also it is useful to know to the project contributors & to maintainers).
• From what he sees, any improvement thoughts to translate.

Time windows:

John Wiegley response:

I am free the following slots:

Schedule in UTC:

Mon 20:00-23:00 UTC
Tue 20:00-23:00 UTC
Wed 03:00-05:00 UTC
Thu 20:00-23:00 UTC
Fri 03:00-05:00 UTC && 17:00-20:00 UTC

Schedule in PST:

Mon 13:00-16:00 PST
Tue 13:00-16:00 PST && 20:00-22:00 PST
Wed
Thu 13:00-16:00 PST && 20:00-22:00 PST
Fri 10:00-13:00 PST

If none of these times work for anyone else, I can juggle some things around to find more available for you.

Marked dates that suit me in the voting.

Picking a time window

Please vote:

Multichoice is possible. Check the dates, check the timezone.

1-click - "I vote here."
2-clicks - "If would be needed."
3-clicks - "Please, no."

https://doodle.com/poll/b6k8cwd738eikb9c?utm_source=poll&utm_medium=link

This is the main event thread, in terms that, in the end of initialization, were and would be published here.

---

The resulting video

From ~3 hours of a dialog, 1/3 of the dialog was constructed to be a part to be recorded as relevant to new contributors:

https://youtu.be/jtr0DHywTtM

Currently it is processing.

[Anton-Latukha]

Time was established as Friday, June 11 {10:00-13:00 PST, 17:00-20:00 UTC}.

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/5679333830?pwd=OTFQd0ZkSElQUCtUbWtLWXlTZm9ldz09
Meeting ID: 567 933 3830
Passcode: F93fX2

[layus]

For future reference, I had a lot of thinking about the adi interpreter and why it prevents optimisations like maybeThunk and printing thunks nicely (theoretically we should be able to inspect the expression and the context hidden in the thunk)

But it takes the form of handwritten notes :-/

[Anton-Latukha]

I need to parse it several more times, to get more from it.

About scope/provenance simplification, Obsidian guys promised & were thinking about it for several years & tried to deliver it several times, see the ideas they almost finished in: #804. But also, you already reviewed that one 8), so probably you know those already.

[Anton-Latukha]

Please, can you open separate reports gradually criticizing the particular pieces of the system & stating ideas/implementation - it would be simpler to understand the problems & their solutions & changes.

As currently, as I understand the main point, you want to communicate: to change the scoping/thunking/type mechanism so it gets simpler & inspectable.

[Anton-Latukha]

⬆️ Head post was updated with published video recording.

[layus]

i had already found the full paper about ADI, but these slides are way easier to process. Dropping the link here for future reference: http://david.darais.com/assets/papers/abstracting-definitional-interpreters/adi.slides.pdf