Aaron Hsu’s talk on APL - I think this talk - https://youtube.com/watch?v=9xCJ3BCIudI - has a more radical interpretation; by the time you’re using lisp to compose lightbulb apis and Bluetooth stream hacking, you’re already past the point of divergence that you mention and are on the wrong side of it.
APL does the hard part of choosing composable functions and presents those to the user, as a simplified interface. Sorting isn’t a global namespace of thirty different sort algorithms so you can delight in picking the exact one you want, sorting is one character (⍋) so you can use it as a composable building block and not care about the details.
I might agree that the core issue is that programs have become less composable over time - but what you ask for doesn’t seem to address that at all. Part of the job of designers and creators is to make simplifying decisions on behalf of users; I don’t want the lightbulb raw interfaces to be exposed to me as an alternative to a crummy closed app product, I want a well designed composable app product as the api I use - all at once, so I don’t have to care about negotiating access tokens or header padding anymore than I have to care about LED heat dissipation or mains smoothing inside the bulb when I flick a light switch.
For composition I want Lego not a machine shop, and I accept compromises in ability to get that. I want grep not fopen().
When you say you want composition what you’re asking for is a machine shop; not a bad thing to ask for, but completely different from where you started out with Unix shell composing of finished product programs which you originally said you wanted.
APL does the hard part of choosing composable functions and presents those to the user, as a simplified interface. Sorting isn’t a global namespace of thirty different sort algorithms so you can delight in picking the exact one you want, sorting is one character (⍋) so you can use it as a composable building block and not care about the details.
I might agree that the core issue is that programs have become less composable over time - but what you ask for doesn’t seem to address that at all. Part of the job of designers and creators is to make simplifying decisions on behalf of users; I don’t want the lightbulb raw interfaces to be exposed to me as an alternative to a crummy closed app product, I want a well designed composable app product as the api I use - all at once, so I don’t have to care about negotiating access tokens or header padding anymore than I have to care about LED heat dissipation or mains smoothing inside the bulb when I flick a light switch.
For composition I want Lego not a machine shop, and I accept compromises in ability to get that. I want grep not fopen().
When you say you want composition what you’re asking for is a machine shop; not a bad thing to ask for, but completely different from where you started out with Unix shell composing of finished product programs which you originally said you wanted.