Dynamic programming languages seem to spend much of their time looking up behaviour associatively.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• whether many (maybe even all) useful organisations of information and behaviour in a dynamic language might be constructed from a single primitive operation: n-way associative lookupquestion0.809
  The central research question explored, by way of examples, throughout the paper.
• Studying programming systems requires a paradigm shift from programming languages, where interaction between programmer and system becomes central rather than program code alone.claim0.771
  Core assertion that systems perspective is incommensurable with language perspective; interaction, not code, is what matters in systems analysis.
• It has long been said that programming languages need more of the features of natural language, but it has not been clear what the desirable features are.claim0.768
  Introduction, motivating the proposal.
• Shouldn’t we be tempted to recode these programs in functional languages, flip the autopilot switch, lean back, have a beer, and leave the parallelizing to them?question0.760
  Rhetorical question about trusting compilers with parallelization.
• A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.concept0.760
  Epigraph by Alan Perlis motivating the search for abstract conceptual models in Fruit's design philosophy.
• it creates a ‘we’; what we are doing, for example, whether our behaviours are coordinated or not, becomes a relevant variable.quote0.755
  Illustrates how non-separable functions shift identity to the collective level.
• Simple experiments with an in-memory Sqlite database suggest dynamic binding operations take several orders of magnitude longer than a dedicated language runtime support library.finding0.751
  Empirical observation that a relational engine is too slow for associative lookup, motivating specialized implementation.
• Pure functional languages cannot be the whole story for parallel programming because they fail to provide needed expressivity.claim0.750
  Argument that recursion equations are inappropriate for many important parallel programs.