What a bizarre (in a good way!) and interesting opportunity.

You're Dr. Ryan Wisnesky, eh? Are y'all familiar with Conal Elliott's "Compiling to categories" work?

http://conal.net/papers/compiling-to-categories/

> Abstract

> It is well-known that the simply typed lambda-calculus is modeled by any cartesian closed category (CCC). This correspondence suggests giving typed functional programs a variety of interpretations, each corresponding to a different category. A convenient way to realize this idea is as a collection of meaning-preserving transformations added to an existing compiler, such as GHC for Haskell. This paper describes such an implementation and demonstrates its use for a variety of interpretations including hardware circuits, automatic differentiation, incremental computation, and interval analysis. Each such interpretation is a category easily defined in Haskell (outside of the compiler). The general technique appears to provide a compelling alternative to deeply embedded domain-specific languages.

I'm an independent (amateur) researcher working in the space of Categorical languages (Joy, my project: http://joypy.osdn.io/ )

I sort of "backed into" the categorical aspect of Joy when implementing type inference ( http://joypy.osdn.io/notebooks/Types.html ). You can evaluate a Joy expression in the "category of values" and get a computation, or in the "category of stack effects" and get a type signature. Elliott is converting Haskell code into Joy-like point-free form and implementing several interesting Categories.

Without going into a lot of detail, I became interested in Prolog (for implementing a Joy compiler) and went down a bit of a rabbithole. ( https://hg.sr.ht/~sforman/Thun/browse/default/thun ) Now I am in some sort of transition phase between what I used to be (mostly Python programmer) to what I'm becoming, a Prolog and Joy programmer.

Anyhow, do you think it would be worthwhile for me to apply? I have a kind of patron right now, but it would be nice if he had some help.

Absolutely, and I would encourage you to contact us offline first to discuss related work in this space - there is indeed a lot, because the category of CQL schemas forms a BCCC and for each schema S, the category of S-databases forms a topos, briefly described here: https://www.categoricaldata.net/cql/haskell.pdf. So CQL is expressive enough to interpret the STLC and higher-order logic in a few different ways.

I've just been reading up on your CQL. Damn son. So I feel like I'm building a sand castle and you guys have built Howl's Moving Castle. Seriously, CQL is amazing. You've done everything I had hoped to data-wise and on such a firm and rigorous foundation. My hat's off to you.

I'm still going to get in touch, because I'm really interested in what you're doing, but maybe I'm not in the right place to apply for anything yet. (We can talk about it.)

The Joy system I'm playing with has some UI ideas inspired by the Oberon OS and Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface", but other than that I'm not sure there's anything there for you. Joy itself might be a good UI "macro" language.

This looks cool. Is there an append-only version of these database tools? (In the sense of never overwriting or deleting a value, only adding a new value with a new timestamp.)

When I first saw this comment it was downvoted. wisnesky is one of the main contributors in the applied category theory world, and one of the reviewers for Conexus's FRP. IMO it's reasonable to advertise for that on a post about Seven Sketches.

I've been meaning to work with CQL to see if it can make XML-to-other-stuff data migration easier. I can picture in my mind how I want the migration to go, but/and it's always a lot of error-prone, one-off work in $work_lang.

FWIW I originally found out about the Seven Sketches paper from this site: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ Your message about funding research/products would probably be of interest to LtU readers, but their site policy is usually against ads. Perhaps you could send a message to http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/1 and ask whether it would be appropriate to post about your venture accelerator and where/how to post it?