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\[12:18\] And often, there's this sort of idea in software development that you should do the most important thing. You should always be doing the most important thing. What I've been finding over the last few months in particular has been that you should do the most motivating thing instead. |
I have a bunch of post-it notes on my desk, and it says "Do work that's exciting", as opposed to necessarily doing work that's like the most important thing. When a user tells me "Oh, I really need this fix", and I'm like "That's a priority 12 bug that will never get done..." You know, sometimes I'll just fix it right ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. I like that. In order to stay motivated, especially on a project like this, do the things that excite you, because those by definition are motivating. You already are motivated are, right? Work on what you're motivated about... It's almost like intelligent procrastination; picking the right thing... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. Are you familiar with that Structured Procrastination Manifesto? |
**Jerod Santo:** No, I haven't heard of this. Tell me about it. |
**Paul Biggar:** It's a thing written by some college professor... I'll look it up so you can put it in the show notes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Thank you. |
**Paul Biggar:** The idea is basically that whenever you have a really important thing, everything else looks a lot more exciting... So you use that most important thing to focus on things that you would not have done if they themselves were the most important thing. So you have a deadline coming up - that's an excelle... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Paul Biggar:** It's a thing that I have used since I was in grad school to actually get things done. It's like, "Uh, I don't feel like that, but there's 12 other things that actually have value, and if I ignore the value and just look at the excitement, I can probably get through them." |
**Break:** \[14:13\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So language design is something that always has fascinated me... And here you are, designing a language. I like the way you said it's more about what it's not than what it is, and I feel like programmers over time, as we experience different languages, we know what we don't want, and we know what we do... |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, I think the first thing I'll say is that Dark is incomplete, and so lots of what I'm about to describe are not necessarily fully there; often there's some of it, but not all of it... So I'll describe the aspirational version. But it's an ML. So the specific subset of functioning languages that in... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Paul Biggar:** \[16:05\] And I guess Scala has some influences from that as well. If you're familiar with Elm, it's sort of Elm. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Paul Biggar:** And the reason that we chose that is 1) the liveness feature that I alluded to earlier, the idea that you can always see a value for the code that you're editing. It works really well in immutable programming languages, so languages where the values are not updatable in the way that they are in object-... |
So that was one reason to do it, because it fits in well with this liveness feature that we wanted... But the other reason to do it is that immutability helps you think about programs, because things never happen over there. They always have to happen in a place that's very obvious that it's happening... So that is the... |
**Jerod Santo:** Go ahead and unpack that live feature for everyone... Because I think I'm picturing it, but I'm sure that you can describe it with words better than I can picture it how it works in my head. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah. So in your editor you've got this line that says \[unintelligible 00:17:43.09\] When your cursor is over the word "name" in the text, at the left of the text it shows you the string pool. Because that was the request that was made a couple of minutes ago. We call them traces. When a request was m... |
So if you ever open a bit of code that you haven't looked at in quite some time, or that someone else wrote, or you aren't familiar with, and you have no idea how it works - it's adding a couple of things, it's concatenating them into substrings... It's like, "Why is it doing this?" Well, you put your cursor in it and ... |
So you can think of it as a debugger where you never have to actually turn on a debugger... or you can think of it as printf debugging, where you never have to add in the printf. Anytime, at any point that you want to see a historical value, or current value, or test value, whatever, you can see it anywhere in the prog... |
**Jerod Santo:** So does that allow a similar to (I think) what Redux made popular, kind of the rewind debugging, where you can step through different states? Or is it always just like the current -- you said "at any time". How do you manipulate that time? |
**Paul Biggar:** Well, because it's immutable, there isn't really a time component. So in Redux and in the Redux debugger really what they're showing you is the old state and the new state. |
**Jerod Santo:** They're modifying the state, yeah. |
**Paul Biggar:** Those are actually independent values. It's actually a list of states, and it's just showing you where they've been historically... Because the new state never changed the old state. Those are different values. That's the immutability of Redux, and it's exactly the same thing in Dark. If you've got an ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, you have to verbalize your air quotes around here, please... |
**Paul Biggar:** \[20:04\] Yeah. So if you have an old value and a new value, and it doesn't update in between, you'll be able to see the value of the old value, you'll be able to see the value of the new value, and you'll be able to see some intermediate values as well. So yeah, very similar to the Redux thing. |
**Jerod Santo:** Cool. |
**Paul Biggar:** If you have used Redux's debuggers and you understand why they are awesome, then you will understand why Dark is awesome. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, very well said. One thing I caught onto there is you mentioned that it's had a few rewrites along the way - Elm, OCaml, and now F\#. |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Can you share some of the insights into why the language switches over time? |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, so in the early days we wrote it in technologies that made sense at the time. So for the frontend it made sense to write in Elm, because I was familiar with Elm... And also because a lot of what we were doing in Dark was we were building our own thing. We weren't building a SaaS app, so reusing a... |
And after a couple years, Elm made a couple of changes. They removed some of the things we were using, and we started to realize that this is a little bit of a dead end, and I wrote about that at the time... So I wrote a compiler to switch from Elm to what was then called BuckleScript, which is now called ReScript... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, wow. Talk about working on what's exciting... You must have been like "I'm gonna write a compiler today. Oh, yeah!" |
**Paul Biggar:** I mean, Ian Connolly, who worked at Dark, made this joke that the answer to everything is not another compiler, but honestly, for me, that is a bunch of -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, in this case it was different... \[laughs\] |
**Paul Biggar:** We've written so many compilers... |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. Stick to what you're good at. |
**Paul Biggar:** One or two compilers a year, basically... And that's actually completely true. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's actually completely true... \[laughs\] |
**Paul Biggar:** Yeah, yeah... Anyway. What was I talking about? |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, switching from Elm to ReScript, or BuckleScript, which - I've never heard of either of these things, so please do tell. |
**Paul Biggar:** Have you heard of ReasonML? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes, I have heard of ReasonML. |
**Paul Biggar:** Okay, so those are all the same thing. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, okay. |
**Paul Biggar:** And they have a branding problem over there... But they've attempted to solve the branding problem by calling it ReScript, but somehow ReasonML remains a new thing, that is not the same thing as it was... It's very confusing. It's all ReScript now. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
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