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arnsholttoday at 10:59 AM1 replyview on HN

The application writing its state to the executable is basically Smalltalk (or Lisp). It's an extremely powerful way of writing software, IMO.


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inigyoutoday at 1:41 PM

Or Forth. But all of these are extreme spaghetti-bait too. Being able to see all the code that goes into an executable, and generate a clean one using only that code, is important for good development hygiene, which of course they didn't know yet in the 1970s. Imagine trying to use version control on a REPL - it doesn't work - you have to version control the commands that go into the REPL and running them on a fresh REPL every time.