Substrate

Great tools can enable co-creation between humans and computers. Molly Mielke joins Mark and Adam to talk about her thesis on the subject. They discuss product design as a fusion of creative and analytical; how consumer preferences may conflict with the Engelbart/Kay vision of computing; the emerging social norms of collaborative software; and why we should bring back skeuomorphism.

[Continuations generalize] the asynchronous value concept. If we plug in `R = Void` then we just get an [asynchronous] value, but if we use a non-`Void` `R` value[,] we will get a type that kind of mixes together aspects of synchronous computation and asynchronous computation

one that emphasises the study of a whole through not only its parts, but the precise way it is built up from its parts. ​ We will welcome papers on implementation.

reasoning about the system should be done recursively on its structure. ​ good software design is ultimately an art. ​ another example of reasoning via an interface. ​ I suspect that interfaces are in fact synonymous with compositionality. That is, compositionality is not just the ability to compose objects, but the ability to work with an object after intentionally forgetting how it was built. ​ can interact in complex ways that block understanding ​ More generally, I claim that the opposite of compositionality is emergent effects. The common definition of emergence is a system being ‘more than the sum of its parts’, and so it is easy to see that such a system cannot be understood only in terms of its parts, i.e. it is not compositional. Moreover I claim that non-compositionality is a barrier to scientific understanding, because it breaks the reductionist methodology of always dividing a system into smaller components and translating explanations into lower levels.