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by metapsj 1177 days ago
You have to follow Marcel Weiher's work on combinators aka connectors.

The following article references his work on in-process rest, polymorphic identifiers, and storage combinators.

What Alan Kay Got Wrong About Objects

https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/11/what-alan-kay-got-wrong-...

Here's an ACM SIGPLAN talk he gave on storage combinators...

Storage Combinators @ SPLASH'19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FFlmkFS1YY

The ACM SIGPLAN talk is a very good starting place to get an understanding what he is talking about.

1 comments

> The ACM SIGPLAN talk is a very good starting place to get an understanding what he is talking about.

What's the big difference from just using composition like we've done for ages?

I mean, his examples in that talk was very reminiscent of stuff I've been doing for many years, and I don't consider myself to be special in any way. Writing decent interfaces, write useful implementations, then compose them together.

Not trying to be dismissive, I just feel like I'm clearly missing something as it's a bit underwhelming for a 2019 talk to be all about "composition is great, use it".

imho the key concept is in-process rest as in representational state transfer as an interface. instead of an imperative interface it's more of a protocol based interface. think http middleware built around a standard interface like ruby's rack, asp.net's owin, or python's wsgi. once you have that style of abstraction it becomes pluggable and you can chain them together.

here's a past discussion on in-process rest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21560626

Thanks, that's a bit more specific.

Think I'd have to play with it to see how it really differed from my normal composition of interfaces and implementations.