Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mhuesch 1047 days ago
sort of, in theory, but in most practical lisp/scheme implementations, certain values are opaque primitives. often functions are opaque. hashmaps, etc, are often primitives which don't have a "dependable formal representation". this means they cannot be e.g. serialized and coherently transmitted between processes.

Urbit solved this with nouns, which is arguably a substantial innovation. PLAN (in the author's view, which I find convincing) improves on this: https://git.sr.ht/~plan/plunder/tree/master/item/doc/PLAN.md

1 comments

This looks really weird to me. I very much doubt this can be made into something practically useful.

Have you seen Unison[1]?

Unison seems like a much more interesting approach to making functions "serializable" and functional programming acquiring distributed capabilities almost transparently.

[1] https://www.unisonweb.org/

Hashed computations including functions distributed over something like DHT is a great concept with a lot of potential for a new form of computation.