Hi Jonathan, "Subtext 3 and 4 were successive experiments in a new semantics of mutable state I describe as synchronously updateable views." What does this mean? Is Chorus a database?
edit: the answer from his paper: "Typical applications are built from at least three distinct technology stacks: a database, a programming language, and a UI framework. Each of these technologies has its own semantics, and much of the complexity of application programming stems from the need to glue them together. Chorus instead provides a single unified model built upon our prior work on Subtext (Edwards 2004-2014). Our statically typed tree structures are effectively databases: the types are schemas, collections serve as tables, and references serve as relationships. All data is persistent, and all execution is performed in concurrent transactions."
Together with Brett Victor his Inventing on Principle, I usually show this https://vimeo.com/140738254 to people when explaining my daily existence and the unfairness of it (as in; some of us have these ideas and yet, my CPU cores + memory are overloaded doing trivial db queries to do code completion and rendering HTML because that is what we write GUI's including code editors in now :).
I sympathize with the frustration! It's debilitating to know that there is a better way to program something yet you can't use it because it hasn't been implemented yet. I mitigate the pain by spending some time every week working on my own ideas of how computers / programming should work. Some of these ideas are very similar (at first glance) to subtext / chorus. I knew I couldn't be the only one thinking like that.
I love programming with computers still (and have so for the past 34 years); the ideas set forward in these videos and implementations do give the feeling we might get somewhere. I myself only write tools for specific projects. I hope I get a chance of distilling something more generic from that some day but that might be simply too hard. As for Alarming Development, I much liked Subtext & Coherence (where did that site go? [0]); from what I have seen Chorus is a more high level approach and very curious to try that out even though we have not seen much yet.
Seriously, thanks for the encouragement. I'm really hoping the latest version will be good enough to share at long last.