So you do dynamic compilation? How is that different from including files in PHP or one bash script calling another? I can even do that in .NET languages like C#.
* Resolve all imports (transitively, if necessary)
* Type-check the code
* Normalize the code (a.k.a. evaluation, but it can normalize functions, too)
It's a little more complex than that (for example, imported code is itself type-checked before substitution into the syntax tree), but that's the basic idea
It's closer in spirit to a Bash script sourcing another bash script (i.e. using "source"). However, the difference from Bash is that:
* In Bash the unit of code composition is statements (as opposed to expressions in Dhall) * When you source another script you can only do so at the top-level of the program, as a statement (as opposed to Dhall where you can import other expressions anywhere within the syntax tree)
I'm less familiar with PHP so perhaps somebody who knows it better can explain how Dhall relates to the PHP model
https://www.tcl.tk/software/plugin/safetcl.html
Minus the type safety, functional approach, etc...but similar in purpose.
However, I think the more important thing I'm trying to fix is how we compose code. The Rube-Goldberg machine the post refers to is the complicated mechanisms we have to deal with for combining code fragments. Reading in a value shouldn't be any different from reading in code and shouldn't require any more overhead than just copy-and-pasting a URL into your program