It's pretty bold to say that their programming language project is a colossal waste of time. I recommend steel-manning [0] and reading their post with a more open and curious mindset.
They could have phrased their article better, sure. But lets not cherry-pick one sentence that's barely relevant to the rest of the article and use it to fuel our anger that they aren't solving Our Favorite Problem. Instead, let's focus on what the author is really trying to get across: that a language can help manage the complexity that can come from mutable state.
If you read the article with a more charitable lens, you'll see that the author is saying a lot that could be new to many readers: a language can combine relational data with functional transformations, a language can expose these patterns to enable more solid architecture, a language might support first-class reactive programming, and a language could (if high level enough) offer replaying and snapshots.
That's honestly fascinating, and I would love to see what kind of ecosystem can grow around a language offering such features.
If you are interested in approaches to combining programming language and database semantic. There is a bunch of work in this area from the 80s… Look up “Persistent Programming” and “Database Programming Languages” (DBPL).
They could have phrased their article better, sure. But lets not cherry-pick one sentence that's barely relevant to the rest of the article and use it to fuel our anger that they aren't solving Our Favorite Problem. Instead, let's focus on what the author is really trying to get across: that a language can help manage the complexity that can come from mutable state.
If you read the article with a more charitable lens, you'll see that the author is saying a lot that could be new to many readers: a language can combine relational data with functional transformations, a language can expose these patterns to enable more solid architecture, a language might support first-class reactive programming, and a language could (if high level enough) offer replaying and snapshots.
That's honestly fascinating, and I would love to see what kind of ecosystem can grow around a language offering such features.
[0] https://themindcollection.com/steelmanning-how-to-discover-t...