I really think everyone that wants to teach programming should look at what why’s doing. And check out Hackety Hack. Now that’s how you teach programming.

Hey, I’m writing it. Here is the current draft, very incomplete, though.

My thoughts on this are mostly pragmatic. The lowest common denominator is going to be a stream of bytes. There’s no getting around that; it’s the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. (This is why resource forks disappeared from Macs.) Being able to access that representation is important; there’s no use in constructing a system which can’t communicate
to the outside world. It’s being restricted to that bytestream representation that is the problem.

I guess what interests me is the layer which converts a bytestream representation to a structured, typed representation and back again, somewhere where it can be endlessly reused and built upon. Some sort of OS-level framework which eliminates the headache with bootstrapping data. Whether this is done with orthoganal persistence or not isn’t really the issue in my mind right now, although it certainly has a mindset which would make such things much simpler.

Think UNIX pipes with structured types, I guess.
“cat bla.jpg.gz | gunzip | jpg2jpgstruct | jpgstruct2imgstruct | imgstructdisplay”, or
“cat foo.c | c2cparsetree | cparsetree2ir | optimizeir | ir2executable > foo.exe”.
Filters stacked one on top of another.

I certainly see your point, though.

Yes, in that LISP macros can certainly be used to achieve what I want.

Maybe, in that I don’t know that there’s a fledgeling community of people sharing and re-using Lisp macros for domain-specific problems. THIS is what I am looking for - libraries that turn Lisp into an even higher-level language.

Granted, I haven’t looked closely. Maybe I’m just too excited about the prospect of XL actually existing to properly research the next-best thing. (The Concept Programming link in the post above? Brilliant stuff.) Which is shortsighted of me, I admit, and something I will probably rectify soon. Might as well work with something mature that gives the power that I want while I’m waiting.

Incidentally, does anyone know if a similar functionality exists in an ML derivative? I sort of get the feeling that if it did, OCaml would be an SML library.