Orthogonal

There are a very small number of truly orthogonal ideas in programming language design. The point of this post is to document them.

Interface

Interfaces go by many names, but all are interfaces:

• API
• ABI
• interface
• duck-typing

Hierarchical object store

Fundamentally, files are just objects. We really shouldn’t need to implement a parser for each different file type, because there should be a one-to-one mapping between file types and plain-old-data file types.

interface of a tagged union type? getValue1 getValue2 getValue3

interface of an untagged union getValue1 getValue2 getValue3

interface of a bool isTrue isFalse

interface of a