Thanks - I'll give that a read. Morel's terminal "compute" step is intended provide monoid comprehensions. And the "into" step does something similar. github.com/hydromatic/m...

Tragedy of the commons

Java doesn't let parameters of lambdas overshadow local variables, but it does let them overshadow fields. I don't think the rule against overshadowing has ever helped me.

Thank you! I don’t really want to innovate in type theory, so followed the Wadler/Wehr/Odersky paper as closely as I could. But the result is good - you can write a query with a mixture of bags and lists, no type annotations, and it comes up with the right type.

We might both be right. Cocker is a great writer; Shatner is a great performer.

I have no idea whether it's fast. I assume you are competing with people who have sweated many weekends to squeeze out performance gains.

But the name 'dijkstralog' is definitely a keeper.

I guess some people are still buying Buicks and so Buicks get the modern tech, like adaptive cruise control, only five years after everyone else.

Not sure about that. I’ve seen Star Trek but never heard that cover.

Bigger question: will Jarvis Cocker be up there with the great English humorists, Oscar Wilde, Jake Thackray, Flanders & Swann?

It is telling that neovim started it for you. In the nineties, Windows nearly wiped out real operating systems, and notepad was the gateway drug. People loved double-clicking files to open them, but without the command line, lost their place in the universe.

Yes, it is.

I feel the same way as you. But I guess when I visit other people’s houses I realize that their definitions of “tidy” and “comfortable” are different from mine. Abstraction is ick to a lot of people.

The other fascinating thing about spreadsheets is that the code is embedded in the data. You start off with pure data and can gradually add little bits of code.

Copying the code involves also copying the data. To apply the same code to a different data set, some kind of abstraction is required.

I wonder whether spreadsheets are attractive to non-programmers because they don't require abstraction. Abstraction is possible (the scripts and functions you mention) but is not the norm.

Spreadsheets are the one and only “language” that lets users solve their problems without hiring or “becoming” programmers. Since then the software folks have been trying (with limited success) to figure out how to make programming languages more like spreadsheets.