“Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Every working programmer carries a quiet sense of the tools we were supposed to have by now. Whether inspired by Joe Armstrong’s writing on Erlang systems that could detect protocol violations as they happen, by program analyses that treat a system’s compiled bytecode as a database to be queried, or by type systems that make mainstream programming languages look like toys, it’s hard not to get the impression that the most powerful ideas in computer science are branches that were cut short before they could reach the people who might have used them. It’s not that these ideas were wrong, but that they were too costly to translate from the papers that birthed them into the languages we actually write. Our own corner of computing is no exception, and some of the ideas we let go were ours to begin with.
The dead do not always stay dead, though. This talk is a séance: an attempt to call back the ideas that should have lived, and to ask what our world might look like once the dead begin to answer.”