I know it's partly on me for not knowing the domain, but I honestly suspected somebody is trying to make fun of me with some concentrated technobabble.
Especially since I wouldn't expect the topic (configuration languages) to require complex mathematical machinery to work with. Now I have something interesting to dig into.
I once saw a demo where someone took a simple operation in Ruby using inefficient-but-elegant syntax (including creating and sorting an array, where a simple loop would have been the appropriate approach in C). He compiled that using TruffleRuby and the entire array construction and sorting was completely optimized out of the generated bytecode.
Here is one of the many: https://youtu.be/bf5pQVgux3c?si=S8Dm5d_GXYXgJtnY
If you go looking for more you will find many more marbles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation#Futamura_pr...
Even now the OG comment says “Fuamura” but the quote in the GP comment has the original “Futurama” written in it.
Especially the Futamura projections. It's almost magic and very few people have even heard of them.
I think that too, "Futamura projections" are important but they are very very far from "complex mathematical machinery" as you may hear it. They are indeed very simple (even mathematically trivial) and require no special background to understand.
Let me tell about a revolutionary device called a Turbo encabulator.
One of the races in the books was the Anthropophagi (basically modeled on New Guinea headhunters). They talked like that.
And the (original, I think), Pokémon or Tech Term: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfsG7AEFLvlW68aIVIs...
not Futurama :D