Point-Free Engineering Philosophy

[jacobcxdev]

I just wanted to clarify a point following on from a question I asked on Twitter:

I was just wondering: will these be specific to your tools, or will they also cover the philosophy behind them? While the tools are bound by the Swift language, the principles are not—a doc which covers them in detail would be incredibly useful when working in other languages.

[(e.g. jacobcxdev/rust-composable-architecture)]

You mentioned that the docs will cover the underlying philosophy, but I am now wondering to what extent you plan on covering this? Will it be a separate doc/collection, or will it be background specific to each tool you've released? Will it be specific to Swift, or will it cover universal concepts? Or indeed, have your plans changed?

While I've been a paying subscriber for several years, you have (amazingly) released so much content that it can be quite difficult to find where you've referenced or implemented specific principles. Such a doc/collection would be particularly useful at this stage even if AI weren't a thing!

As a side note, I have considered asking for permission to scrape all the episode transcripts locally and distill them with an LLM for my own personal use while subscribed, but you may not be comfortable with that (you reserve all rights to episode content) and indeed it might not even be necessary if you release something yourself—so I have chosen to wait and see.

Thanks again :)

[mbrandonw]

Hi @jacobcxdev, we do plan on encoding all of the patterns and best practices we cover in episodes in the skill documents themselves. There is already some of that in the state of the docs right now, but there is a lot more we will be releasing (just 2 days ago we had a big update to the docs and more coming). This beta period for the docs has been more about ironing out the kinks of the pfw tool, and now that the dust is settling on that we will be fleshing out the docs themselves a lot more.

As a side note, I have considered asking for permission to scrape all the episode transcripts locally and distill them with an LLM for my own personal use while subscribed, but you may not be comfortable with that (you reserve all rights to episode content) and indeed it might not even be necessary if you release something yourself—so I have chosen to wait and see.

Yeah we rather people not do this. We hope the regularly updated skill documents will be a better tool for this, as well as a full-text search on the site.

[jacobcxdev]

Wonderful, thank you for your reply!