Programming with Managed Time: Essay and Videos | Hacker News Reader

Programming with Managed Time: Essay and Videos

research.microsoft.com

69 pointsseanmcdirmid17 comments

This is excellent stuff. I chuckled at the sidebar note: "And no, Smalltalk does not already do this."

Just in case Ralph Johnson is reading :)

The idea of strongly-timed ticks reminds me of the advantages of using a clock music programming language ChucK: http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/

This is really cool! My question is: how much of the managed time philosophy could be bolted on to a functional reactive programming environment like Elm?

If Elm really does get an analogue of `IO`[0], it could work just like that but with the special replay sauce described in the paper. The type could have operations that read and write from "cells" and "accumulators", and the command interpreter would replay code as usual.

Elm is already considering things like `Signal (Command a) -> Signal a` to blend imperative programming with FRP; in this case, you'd have functions like `Signal (Glitch a) -> Signal a`

[0]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/elm-discuss/ALLG6GrW...

I first did a system like this for a FRP-like system called SuperGlue back in 2007:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2149

However, I was disappointed because I couldn't use signal abstractions in the implementation of this system; instead I invented something that was the beginning of the work presented here.

Once you have effects (implicit or explicit), something like Glitch will work for that system. However, it is very important to make sure effects are de-serialized syntactically (they basically need to be wrapped up in commutative monads), otherwise replay isn't well defined and you'd need to go with more of a self-adjusting computation approach that preserves partial orders.

Performance is going to be pretty bad with all of those re-executions, logging of state and so on.

Yes and maybe not.

One optimization we perform now is to have a slow-path replay that does book keeping: logging updates, tracing dependencies, and performing dynamic type checks. But during this slow-path, a fast-path replay is generated that just re-executes the code while keeping book keeping constant (so no book keeping overhead), which is applicable if values just change slightly (e.g. in a physics simulation). See the paper for more details.

Looks like this is a blog post providing a demo and accessible description of the research in this paper (linked in the post): https://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/onward14.pdf.

The previous HN discussion on this topic is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7702796

Correct. The original title emphasized that, but was edited for some reason.

Our mistake, sorry.

No problem. I included the essay + videos in the title because the paper previously submitted to HN has the same title, so I didn't want to look like I was submitting the same thing again.

"Come on, no feedback at all? Lambda the Ultimate By Sean McDirmid at Mon, 2014-08-25 10:15"

“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was, and always will be yours. If it never returns, it was never yours to begin with.” ― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Unleash the Night

Excellent expansion of the material Sean, especially the reference to the influence of your thesis on SuperGlue and self adjusting computation!

The time has now come to set your prototype free, as you promised to. It is one thing to evaluate videos and papers, and quite another to work with a prototype and submit changes/proposals/code.

Managed Time threatens to be stillborn by continuing delay in the release of your prototype. Your registration to this work is cemented, as is Chris Hancock's, whom you continually reference throughout your work.

Set it free.

How to package it? What should it do? It is one thing to build a research prototype, it is quite another to build something that is useful to others! I would also have to get my bosses to agree, but that is quite secondary.

Believe me, I want to release, but I have to figure out how!

IMHO, releasing it with a couple of working examples would be sufficient to get the ball rolling for most of the hacker types who would be interested in working with the prototype.

As the code is C# based, Visual Studio Express would provide the perfect vehicle for experimentation, requiring little in the way of formal packaging.

Release it under Github and let the organic evolutionary forking work.

I would expect there to be a flurry of prototyping activity, which should be culled into a stable release once this phase settles.

I would recommend to get the ball rolling now before the conference in October so that it can be released then.

Lambda the Ultimate Programming with Managed Time To appear in Onward! 2014; abstract:

>>Live coding vs. live programming ... But if instead you were trying to develop better nuclear plant software tested via simulation, a live programming environment might make more sense.

My Motivation: I'm one of those guys "trying to develop better" safety critical Avionics Software "tested via simulation".

http://coandaaero.wordpress.com/

Thank you for being so enthusiastic and optimistic about my research, it really means a lot to me.

I'll see what I can do; it would be nice to have this project up at least on Github.

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