I enjoyed Hillel Wayne’s recent newsletter about microfeatures they’d like to see in programming languages. A “microfeature” is essentially a small convenience that makes programming in that language a bit easier without fundamentally changing it. I love this idea. I’m partial to a bit of syntactic sugar, even if it can cause cancer of the semicolon. I have a few features that I’d love to see more languages adopt, so I thought I’d join in the fun. Unlike Hillel’s, however, most of mine are much larger changes. I’ve long thought it was time for a bit more experimentalism to return to programming language design, and not just for type systems! Maybe these ideas will inspire you to think up some whacky new programming languages. Let me know in the comments.
Continue reading “A few programming language features I’d like to see”Tag: datalog
Is Datalog a good language for authorization?
Datalog is a logic programming language, based on Prolog, which is seeing something of a resurgence in interest in recent years. In particular, several recent approaches to authorization (working out who can do what) have used Datalog as the logical basis for access control decisions. On the face of it, this seems like a perfect fit, and there’s a lot to recommend it. I myself have been a fan of Datalog since first coming across it at the start of my PhD studies back in 2003, and have even written papers advocating for it. However, although I think it has a lot of benefits, I think there is some confusion about some of its complexity results that means it is not always as good a fit as you may be led to believe.
Continue reading “Is Datalog a good language for authorization?”
Neil Madden 