Have you ever packaged anything?

• Have you ever been confused by packages?

• There are so many parts when it comes to packaging:

  1. There's the stamps,
  2. the addresses,
  3. the contents,
  4. the damage insurance,
  5. the package weight,
  6. customs declarations!

  There's so many parts!

• Look at them! ⟪ gesture to screen ⟫
  • There's so many! The place is a mess!
  • This could be you parents' basement!
  • It could be your work desk!
  • In computing, this is your code! Mish-mashed from smaller pieces!
  • Eek!
• Unlike the day-to-day mail we receive, in computing, packages take the form of modules and each of these separate, yet crucial, aspect of packaging corresponds to a different language! ⟪Pause⟫

• Think about it: On average, a ‘coding language’ actually consists of at least 4 different languages! That's like if your package in the mail had

  • a stamp in English,
  • an address in Spanish,
  • contents in Latin,
  • the insurance policy in German,
  • package weight in Gaelic.

  What a headache!

• You shouldn't have to go to college to understand how your mail works!

• Just as a clingy boyfriend, or a puppy that follows you around, is called a ‘dependent type’ we have those in computing too and they're essentially the same thing!
  • Software that uses dependent types lets us treat the different pieces as if they were the same –except packages, they still live in their own language.
• Packages are a building block of computing, like Lego(!): You can build better, compact, software using pre-built blocks. ⟪ Gesture hands together. ⟫
• Since computing is so young as a science, we don't really know how pieces should be glued together.
  • You'd think otherwise since you have a brick in your pocket that can access all knowledge of humanity.
• For the most part, we cope by ad hoc methods – “it works good enough”.
  • Unfortunately this does not scale!
  • ⟪wave at slide⟫ package maintenance can get out of hand rather quickly for any large piece of software!

• Just as the clingy boyfriend and the puppy dog that follows you around can be seen as just more family; with dependent types, packages too can be treated as just normal blocks.

• I'm researching the arithmetic of packages to help software developers manage large projects and reduce complexity & maintenance costs.

  My research suggests that packaging can be treated in the same way we treat numbers.

  • We can combine numbers by adding them, likewise we can combine packages by putting their pieces together in a new package!
  • In grade school, “2 + 3 and 3 + 2 are both 5”, yet with packages “2 + 3 might be 5, but 3 + 2 might not even exist!”

So next time you send a package, think of what it means to me and how many languages are involved!