lamancha ii: the Adama incubator

Nov 2019 – Aug 2020 · age 37–38

What it was

The private birthplace of the Adama language. A program described one living document: a multiplayer board-game state with public and private reactive fields, tables with queries, formulas computed per viewer, a state machine of labels, and channels whose fetch paused the whole game until a particular player answered. Each program compiled to a Java class, hot-loaded in process: the document was the virtual machine. Every loop drew down a goodwill budget and every statement ticked a cost meter. A Battlestar Galactica board game implementation served as the forcing example and was auto-played 1.2 million times. A class named ShipIt carried the core out to the public project.

Wins, for the age

• At thirty-seven, over 1,458 commits in fourteen months, Jeff designed and shipped a language, compiler, reactive runtime and language server alone, with 2,453 JUnit tests behind it.
• A game state as a living document compiled to a hot-loaded class, a year ahead of Cloudflare Durable Objects (2020).
• Blocking futures without coroutines, arriving concurrently with Temporal's human-in-the-loop signals (2020): throw, revert the reactive tree, and re-run when the answer comes.
• Privacy as a type-system feature, where a viewer denied everything costs no allocation at all. No popular system has claimed that ground yet.
• Found on their own what Ethereum gas had already found: a budget turns an infinite loop into an exception.

What it taught

• Hidden information is the forcing function. Traitors and secret decks drove the privacy system, the bubbles and the futures.
• Gold tests over generated text make a compiler rewrite survivable.
• Design the billing model into the emitted code early.
• Part of "100% coverage" was a hack, and megabytes of benchmark output went into version control. This ape with a keyboard learned both are debts.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Career Facebook: real-time state pushed to many viewers at scale. Jove 3: a reactive dependency graph as its own language. Kira Project: a typed language compiling into another runtime. Lamancha I: the lesson to use a language. Play Workspace: stabilized transactions and snapshot plus log. Descendants: Adama: the product. Adama Core: the runtime, translator and tests that ShipIt copied. Adama Language: privacy modifiers, bubbles, channels, labels. Lamancha IV: the server layer, moved out. Part of: Lamancha.

Epitaph

Here lies the lab where a document learned to keep secrets from its own players, and every loop was given a budget of goodwill. It did not die; a class called ShipIt carried it out the door.