Drexler Blogs!
As I expect to cut back on blogging soon, I’m delighted to report that Eric Drexler now blogs, at Metamodern.com. Of his first dozen posts, my favorite is on the promise of formal proof in math and digital systems:
If this doesn’t seem important, it may be because we’re so accustomed to living with systems that have built on foundations made of mud, and thinking about a future likewise based on mud. All of us have difficulty imagining what could be developed in a world where computers didn’t crash, were guaranteed to be immune from virus attack, and could safely download code written by the devil himself, and where crucial pieces of software could be guaranteed to not leak data. In this area, as everywhere in the realm of fundamental technological progress, the possibilities we can imagine will become the basis for possibilities we can’t imagine, and these, as they become real, will make possible yet more.
Did Robin post earlier that he was going to cut back on blogging so that it's not a surprise to anybody?
Re: You lose some of the value of strong static typing when you make it optional.
Static typing sucks for most things - languages at that level should be prototype-based - but there are some cases where it is useful. Therefore, it should be optional - provided the syntactic cost is not too great. IMO, the syntactic cost is negligible - if you treat type safety as just another sort of contract.