lamancha

Mar 2019 – Aug 2020 · age 37–38

What it was

A "rethink the world" research project, named for the man who tilted at windmills, whose README promised a weapon to kill the web. Over 1,468 commits it became something smaller and better: a programming language for board games. It moved in phases. First came a C# and Skia scene-graph browser, ended on purpose with a six-lesson postmortem. Then a protocol design for chain-replicated game state with a per-device privacy filter. Then the Java incubator of the Adama language, where a program describes one living document whose fields know who may see them and whose channels wait for a player's decision. A small Svelte client played Hearts against it, and a service shell with a Raft demo stood around it. In July 2020 the core was copied to the public Adama project, and the commits here stop five weeks later.

Wins, for the age

• At thirty-seven, Jeff wrote a postmortem the day the first attempt died, and the one lesson it executed, "Programming Language support is the path towards victory", produced everything after it.
• The document as the virtual machine: a program compiled to a hot-loaded class that is the game state, a year ahead of Cloudflare Durable Objects (2020).
• Blocking futures without coroutines, concurrent with Temporal's human-in-the-loop signals (2020), so a rule could simply wait for a human.
• Privacy in the type system, viewer_is and bubble<who> making who-may-see-what a compile-time property. No popular system has claimed that yet.
• Fourteen months of near-daily commits and 361 gold-tested programs from one primate before anything shipped.

What it taught

• Write the postmortem before starting the next thing, then actually follow it.
• Ambition needs a forcing example. A Battlestar Galactica board game implementation, with hidden hands and traitors, drove every privacy and channel feature.
• Generated gold tests make a language rewrite survivable; a parser swap and a keyword rename each touched about 92,000 lines and shipped.
• Found on their own what Ethereum gas had already found: a compute budget turns an infinite loop into a located exception, and a cost counter makes compute billable.
• The yak is real. The browser, the protocol and the service shell were detours; the language was the destination.

Genealogy

Ancestors: none on record for the umbrella. Its parts carry the older lines. Descendants: Adama: living documents, compile-time privacy, blocking futures and the compute budget, shipped publicly. Parts: Lamancha I, Lamancha II, Lamancha IV.

Epitaph

It tilted at the web with C# and Skia, wrote down why it lost, and spent fourteen months teaching a document to keep secrets from its own players. The windmill was a browser; the giant that fell was a language.