Bill Wadge

https://billwadge.wordpress.com Informal descriptions of my inventions, including Lucid lang Foundations of Math explained. My adventures in Academia Lame jokes

followup to https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-universe-and-te… -- previously on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19478384

So happy to have stumbled upon this, this is truly awesome, a recounting of Lucid's creation and various details by one of its creators. Probably best to start at the beginning: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/lucid-the-origins/ And then work your way forward. The book is also great: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~plaice/archive/WWW/1985/B-AP85-LucidDatafl… This stuff has a very direct line to the modern "FRP" ideas (with the exception of the actual FRP by Conal Eliot, which is actually quite different from what most of us call FRP, oh details...). And it's so much more cogent. Also check out the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language) When I looked at it a while ago, I couldn't find a working implementation, so I banged on it until I got something that at least appeared to work (on OS X): https://github.com/mpw/pLucid-osx

The pinnacle of confusion can be seen in the following abomination: x = x + 1 Bill Wadge invented the dataflow language Lucid in the early 1970s by pondering this very paradox. He wrote a nice series of blog posts about it that begins at http://billwadge.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/lucid-the-origins. His insight was that x = x + 1 isn't contradictory once you recognize that the two x's have implicit temporal subscripts. That is, "the value of x at time t+1 = the value of x at time t, plus 1". Make that temporal dimension explicit in the language and you can go back to having a nice equational semantics. It's interesting, though, and perhaps germane to your point, that this insight turned out to lead far away from mainstream languages. I've come to the conclusion that math and programming are very different things because math isn't executable. Programs have to run on a physical machine, math doesn't. The "physical" part changes everything. As someone pointed out in a blog post recently, even programs written in the purest most side-effect-free languages have side-effects when they run. I suspect that functional programming ultimately runs aground on this discrepancy - i.e. on the intrinsic imperativeness of the machine. The "x = x+1" paradox can be seen as a distillation of this imperativeness. Perhaps we should teach programming not as math but as a kind of mechanics.

I'm certainly interested in this, but for different reasons. Over the years, several people have bent my ears about Duane's theorem that suggests the double-slit experiment is not demonstrating quantum effects at all. It strikes me that this could help establish or overturn such claims. https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/double-slit-experiment-no-m… Any thoughts? Could it help to test it on a planet-sized scale?

Innovative ways to improve learning are always exciting, but leading with a hypothesis contrary to my personal experience[1] is unlikely to convince me the conclusion be valid. https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/the-secret-of-academic-succ… > "The temptation is to write papers proclaiming the superiority of your work and the pathetic inadequacy of the contributions of A, B, C, …" [1] in particular, working memory is not an issue with books: rereading is a thing.

This reminds me of an article on HN from earlier this year by a reviewer of grant proposals, about how often they receive applications that clearly describe the problem the applicant wants to solve, but don't describe an idea with which to solve it: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/10/im-good-enough-im-smart-eno…

It seems the writing that he was referring to is this: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-funnin-seri… I'm not really seeing where that could have been offensive. Its easy to disagree with, of course, but was it attacking anyone?

The primary fun filled failure, https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/honest-wes-just-funnin-seri… is a pretty neat excerpt I had never read before, especially as one who toes that Wizard approach towards formal verification.

And goes well with the article[1] we discussed yesterday[2] ! [1] https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/b-before-a/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19608883

It is possible that you are studying modal logic. https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/i-deduce-you-are-studying-l…

And the scary thing is that one can do even better: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/extensional-higher-order-pr… https://github.com/acharal/hopes

Lucid was called a dataflow language at one point, but is more accurately an 'eduction' language. The key difference is that Lucid relies on demand-driven evaluation, wheras dataflow semantics entirely relies on the more push-based semantics of data becoming available to fire an operation. I suppose you could call it 'tagged-token demand-driven dataflow', but its semantics are much different from other dataflow languages such as SISAL, VAL or Id. https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/lucid-eduction/

The post about it: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/quiz-script/

I'm not sure which way the comments went, but there are some that appear both here and there. One doesn't seem to have popped up here, but is so good that I must repeat it (it's not mine!): > That thing that you are studying… we call it denotational logic. > - JoshH (https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/i-deduce-you-are-studying-l…