“You might enjoy this amazing talk.”
Amazing Barliman talk with a standout moment
Full comment
You might enjoy this amazing talk. I've linked to a part when the next 20 seconds of explanation turns the amazing up to 11. this video
Barliman: trying the halting problem backwards, blindfolded - William Byrd, Greg Rosenblatt
8K views · Dec 3, 2016 · 36:14 · 3 HN recommenders · 4 mentions · discussed 2017–2024
A Clojure/conj 2016 talk demoing Barliman, a prototype smart editor that does program synthesis. Given a partial program and tests, it completes the program using a relational interpreter written in miniKanren.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN people point to it as an amazing demonstration of relational programming and program synthesis that still looks exciting after LLM code generation.
“I work on miniKanren, which is a logic programming language with a complete search that doesn't hit the nontermination issues you mention.”HN comment, 2017
What Hacker News said 4
“The Clojure/conj 2016 talk Greg Rosenblatt and I gave on Barliman”
Barliman talk on relational program synthesis
Full comment
For anyone who finds this topic interesting, you might be interested in the following resources: link The second edition of `The Reasoned Schemer` (MIT Press, 2018): link The Clojure/conj 2016 talk Greg Rosenblatt and I gave on Barliman: this video `A Unified Approach to Solving Seven Programming Problems (Functional Pearl)`, William E. Byrd, Michael Ballantyne, Gregory Rosenblatt, Matthew Might (ICFP 2017) (Open Access): link and the related talk: link and Nada Amin's interactive version of the paper: link Cheers, --Will
“the Barliman demo is still pretty exciting even after LLM codegen.”
Barliman demo of synthesis still exciting
Full comment
Have you checked out any of the minikanren logic programming environments people have implemented in scheme? The Reasoned Schemer is an accessible introduction to that space if you’re not put off by the socratic-themed dialogue. & the Barliman demo is still pretty exciting even after LLM codegen. this video
“I work on miniKanren, which is a logic programming language with a complete search that doesn't hit the nontermination issues you mention.”
Program synthesis with miniKanren's complete search
Full comment
Other search algorithms can take up lots of memory to store progress they've made down different paths. Having only one active state also lets you map unification down to efficient low level cpu operations. If you have multiple states, you either have to copy lots of data when you fork the state or you use a persistent data structure but can't use side effects, so everything is a bit slower. It's a tradeoff though. I work on miniKanren, which is a logic programming language with a complete search that doesn't hit the nontermination issues you mention. The complete search lets us do some pretty cool stuff with program synthesis (though we're not about to put any programmers out of business just yet): this video Note that you can implement iterative deepening depth first search on top of prolog if you want a complete search there. Iterative deepening takes a little more time but avoids the memory problems with breath-first. SWI has tools built in to help there: link And I believe Ciao implements its iterative deepening library with a meta-interpreter: link