Future is Declarative (Part 1)
Software Development is hard.
Software development is a form of Art.
Software development is a goal-driven, multi-paradigm, multi-lingual, auto-manual, abstract creation process, for sure.
And all this, just for producing something which most of the time somebody else designs or needs.
What if everything we did, was instead…
Declarative
“Declare your desired outcome, and specify the tasks needed.”
There is nothing more clear to most of the people, other than a series of steps with distinct and clear meaning.
From a “food recipe", a doctor’s prescription, up to the “setup instructions of a device manual", it is obvious that people need the steps to achieve a certain goal. Like machines, given orders, we humans are susceptible to commands both in a negative or positive way, and the most important thing is that we cannot “function" properly without them.
Someone would say:
So, what is all this nonsense are you mumbling about?
The Future
I am talking about new ideas to make the web more useful!
I am talking about new ideas to make the web “smaller"!
I am talking about new ways of helping us “communicate" with the machines!
New ways of making everyone of us a creator of new content or ideas and technologies.
New ways of decarbonizing the web by using less data and less power!
How to
Easy peasy!
Well… not really!
There is something, that we could do, but it will take time and effort. And I know that, because I am currently working on it, and also hope that some others do as well.
We should invent a new language!
Not a framework or a library or a parser.
Onwards
- First you need to invent a declarative language.
- Then you need to teach people this new language.
- Of course you need to convince important people or foundations that the web needs to adapt to this language.
- More importantly, you need to make this language easy to understand or better, that there is no need to understand!
- And last but not least, you need to make this language small and easy to compress and transfer “on the wire".
A final advice
Human DNA is already doing this!
So….
- Invest time in finding the “codons" in this new language
- Understand DNA transcription and translation
- Realize Gene Expression and Protein Synthesis, as an analogy to functional expressions in code
- Apply compression to your language like Histones, Chromatines do.
…more to come in part 2.
