Where Good Ideas Come From

I recently finished reading Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From”. This is a rather interesting book which takes a walk through history looking at how good ideas come to be.

More on Flow-Sensitive Typing

The idea behind flow-sensitive typing in Whiley is to give a statically typed language the look-and-feel of a dynamically typed language (as much as possible). The following illustrates: int average([int] items): v = 0 for i in items: v = v + items[i] return v / |items| Here, we see that there are only two type declarations: one for the parameter, and one for the return.

Implementing Actors on the JVM

Whiley adopts the Actor model of concurrency, instead of the traditional multi-threading approach used in e.g. Java. The actor model is simple and easy to use, and is less likely to result in complex race conditions or deadlocks.

Function Pointer Syntax for Whiley

One of the next big issues needing to be addressed is the syntax for function and method pointers. The syntax I’m thinking of is close to that used in C and C++ (see e.

Better Namespaces

An interesting problem I’ve encountered many times in Java is that of conflicting names. For example, suppose I have the following code: import wyil.lang.*; import wyil.lang.Type.*; ... public static Type T_Bool = new Type.