Gerald Sussman on Flexible Systems, The Power of Generic Operations [video]

He defers talking about how to make these abstractions efficient. I'm curious about who would know how to do that and whether there is some material on that topic?

For certain classes of problems that interest me I've resigned myself to languages where I can be very specific about the implementation and leave the higher-order reasoning and problem description to more human-readable formats like English and diagrams.

It'd be nice to know if, though dangerous, we could have our cake and eat it too.

The ideas about interoperation and degeneracy are really cool. The C ABI seems to be a fairly common method of interoperability between languages but also rather restrictive for certain run times. I wonder if we'll ever get to a place where we can have real, robust interoperability.

The generic function is the basic unit of abstraction in Julia. And this is exactly what makes Julia a very powerful language.

If anyone is interested in reading more about Julia's design, I recommend Jeff Bezanson's thesis https://github.com/JeffBezanson/phdthesis/raw/master/main.pd...

The cameraman sucks.