what have I been up to? well, hm, good question, let’s see.
I’ve been pushing along a wasm runtime in rust — with something like half of the core test suite passing now — which has been instructive (pun. intended.)
I’ve also been absolutely tanking this book, “empires of the word”, which examines different lingua franca through the years. It’s very dry but also very interesting?
the larger theme the author explores is that, with some (very grim) exceptions, language is seldom effectively spread through force – invaders tend to pick up the language of the people they invade, if they stick around.
new ideas – in technology, trade, religion – appear to be how languages most typically spread; strong written or ritualized oral traditions reinforce the staying power of the language – at least insofar as I follow what this book is saying.
okay, one last tiny thing I learned from this book because I just realized it's after midnight and I should go to bed:
Sugar has its roots in Sanskrit ("sharkara"), BUT: when alexander's army first encountered sugarcane in India, they didn't have a way to describe it other than "honey without the help of bees"
(and bringing this full circle with Wasm: this has all got me thinking about how language communities work within programming – how programming language communities influence each other & the difficulties that emerge when they attempt to interoperate with one another; how far distant is an IDL from how we used aramaic or latin as a bridge for cross-language diplomacy?)
(... are demos where hosts written in one language communicate with guests written in another language really that reflective of how people would actually collaborate using this technology?)
@sunfish it strikes me that, in non-browser contexts, there’s much less of a premium on being able to communicate cross-language — it was already possible (via IPC, network RPC, etc.)
Wasm changes technical costs but doesn’t change the social costs that currently push operators of medium-to-large systems towards “approving” a set of languages for internal use.
Lightweight virtualization and runtime linking — as a tool for allowing multiple teams to ship a system — seem more compelling?
@sunfish I’m framing this from the perspective of a hypothetical 50-ish person sized startup: how does wasm change how my team builds systems? How does it change the skills I look for in hiring?
I come back to “it lets them work in small teams that ship work incrementally without having to lean on microservice RPC”; maybe reducing infra spend.
Wasm might even mean that I can hire for fewer languages, even, in that it increases the number of platforms I can target w/a single language.
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