Speaking My Mind

Here is an interesting intuition: the key to liberating software development is to use programming languages that are not, by themselves, turing-complete. That means no loops, no recursion 'in-language'. Why? Two reasons: any program that is subject to the halting problem is inherently unknowable: in general, the only way to know what a turing-complete program means is to run it. This puts very strong limitations on the combinatorics of turing-complete programs and also on the kinds of support tooling that can be provided: effectively, a debugger is about the best that you can do with any reasonable effort. On the other hand, a sub-turing language is also 'decidable'. That means it is possible to predict what it means; and paradoxically, a lot easier to provide a rich environment for it etc. etc. An interesting example of two languages on easier side of the turing fence are TeX and CSS. Both are designed for specifying the layout of text, TeX is turing complete and CSS