Posted by draxen 1 day ago
Ask HN: What are forgotten topics in computing that deserve a new revisit?
Procedurally generated content is also a lot more interesting. Without structure, you get slop.
You can set the beginning of a story and an ending, as well as a story contour. Then procedurally generate content that ends at these points, even if they seem to veer away.
Metaprogramming for similar reasons, things like writing scripts/languages for very specific problems.
There's good techniques for all these, but the ROI was too low compared to the returns. It was difficult to write tests for the output space, but now it's a lot simpler.
Xanadu
1) The Zen of Exotic Computing by Peter Kogge - https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/1.9781611977295
2) Handbook Of Unconventional Computing in 2-vols (Vol1-Theory, Vol2- Implementations) by Andrew Adamatzky et al. - https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/12232#...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GA144
As for your original question: you might want to have a look at languages that overlap the border between 'traditional' PLs, and hardware description languages. Or hardware/software co-design, and tools used in that field. Edit: also see Oberon.
> The only example I know of is the one that runs Java bytecode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle
Probably implemented in billions of ARM cores out there. Unsure how much use it sees though.