geom VS mu

On the flip side, I got to read some of the Clojure source code, which was very educational. I also got to understand a bit more the usefulness of protocols (using defprotocol and defrecord to provide several implementations). Here it was very useful to read the source code of thi-ng/geom.

This would make sense if Knuth used literate programming primarily for academic papers. But in fact he created WEB for writing TeX and METAFONT, both of which (while their source code was published as a book later) were production systems, and in fact for several decades now he uses CWEB for all programs he writes, including several a week that he writes for himself. (Some of which are online at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html .) In contrast, apart from the paper he wrote introducing LP, and the two Bentley columns about LP in CACM, I'm not aware of any other academic paper of his that presents programs — at any rate, the total number must be very small.

The goal is not an "academic paper"; his experience (and that of others who have seriously tried LP) is that it helps with actual writing of programs, less time spent debugging, etc.

Yes, there are challenges with two or more programmers, but nothing unsurmountable. See "Literate Programming on a Team Project" (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/techreports/1991/302.pdf coauthored by Norman Ramsey, who later developed noweb) and some stories like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17484452 (and https://github.com/thi-ng/geom which went from LP to conventional).

Depending on how minimal a distribution you want, a few years ago I had a way to take a single ELF binary created by my computing stack built up from machine code (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) and package it up with just a linux kernel and syslinux (whatever _that_ is) to create a bootable disk image I could then ship to a cloud server (https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode, though I don't use Linode anymore these days) and run on a VPS to create a truly minimal webserver. If this seems at all relevant I'd be happy to answer questions or help out.

This was the thinking behind my https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Yes thank you, I was indeed alluding to https://github.com/akkartik/mu. Perhaps a more precise term would be "software stack".

I built a computer with its own languages, and I consider it to be _less_ cognitive load when everything is in 1/2/3 languages. I don't have to worry that the next program I want to read the sources will require "Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc."

There are other metrics to consider besides your notions of cognitive load and productivity. Inferno predates most of the languages on your list. My computer (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) uses custom languages because I was able to design them to minimize total LoC, and to ensure the dependency graph has no cycles (unlike all of the conventional software stack, at least until https://www.gnu.org/software/mes connects up all the dots).

"Separation of concerns is a hard-won insight."

Absolutely. I'm arguing for separating just concerns, without entangling them with considerations of people.

It's certainly reasonable to consider my projects toy. I consider them research:

* https://github.com/akkartik/mu

* https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

"The idea that projects should take source copies instead of library dependencies is just kind of nuts..."

The idea that projects should take copies seems about symmetric to me with taking pointers. Call by value vs call by reference. We just haven't had 50 years of tooling to support copies. Where would we be by now if we had devoted equal resources to both branches?

"...at least for large libraries."

How are these large libraries going for ya? Log4j wasn't exactly a shining example of the human race at its best. We're trying to run before we can walk.

I still believe :) I'm looking not for an economic argument but for a strategic one. I think[1] a self-hosted setup with minimal dependencies can be more resilient than a conventional one, whether with a vendor or self-hosted.

https://sandstorm.io got a lot right. I wish they'd paid more attention to upgrade burdens.

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu

I'm very interested in the network stack, having explored it for a while for https://github.com/akkartik/mu before giving up. What sort of network card do you support?