phrasing tweaks

Author: SethTisue

blog/_posts/2016-11-17-splash.md

@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ there are so many of them around.
 SPLASH is a set of conferences running together (OOPSLA being one of
 the main ones), so you get exposed to a variety of topics and get to
 talk to people from many different areas. One talk that stood out for
-me was Simon Peyton Jones speaking about how they reform the UK
+me was Simon Peyton Jones speaking about how they are reforming the UK
 curriculum to teach computational thinking to kids from primary school
 on. It's been Simon's main "other" occupation besides Haskell and he
 gave a fascinating talk that conveyed his great enthusiasm for the
@@ -29,21 +29,21 @@ was that we have to act now, when things are waiting to be defined. A
 quote: "We know we have failed if, 10 years from now, the outcome is
 just that every kid can code Java".
 
-At the Scala Symposium I was talking about how we implemented
+At the Scala Symposium I spoke about how we implemented
 higher-kinded types in Dotty. This was a long and often painful
-journey. We tried overall four different approaches. Each of them was
+journey. In total we tried four different approaches. Each of them was
 an effort of many weeks -- sometimes several months -- to implement
 the new scheme, debug it, and then finally discard it because we found
-out it was too hard to get right, or did not live up otherwise to
+out it was too hard to get right, or did not otherwise live up to
 expectations.
 
 The original reason for trying so many different avenues had to do
 with DOT, which is intended to be the foundation of future Scala. DOT
-as is has no provision for higher-kinded types, but it turns out
+as-is has no provision for higher-kinded types, but it turns out
 that a restricted version of higher-kinded types can be
 straightforwardly encoded in it.  That issue is not just academic
 because the _dotty_ compiler uses DOT's constructs as its core data
-structures. So what is hard to do in DOT tends to hard to implement in
+structures. So what is hard to do in DOT tends to be hard to implement in
 the compiler as well.
 
 Originally, we played with the idea to restrict higher-kinded types to
@@ -53,18 +53,17 @@ forced us to restrict the Scala language. More advanced idioms, such
 as type classes for `Monad` and `Functor` would have required rewrites
 and would not be as convenient to use. The boundary between what was
 expressible and what was illegal was also not very intuitive. For instance,
-one could define an abstract polymorphic subtype of `Maps` in the usual way:
-
+one could define an abstract polymorphic subtype of `Map`s in the usual way:
 
     type M[K, V] <: Map[K, V]
 
-But one would could not define a type where the parameters were reversed. I.e.
+But one could not define a type where the parameters were reversed. I.e.
 
     type M[V, K] <: Map[K, V]
 
 would have been illegal.
 
-To address these limitations, we played then with two more complicated
+To address these limitations, we then played with two more complicated
 encodings of higher-kinded types in _dotty_'s core types. Neither of
 these worked out very well so in the end we settled for the "brute
 force" approach of adding higher-kinded types without trying to re-use
@@ -83,5 +82,3 @@ works out it would be a case where compiler hacking influenced the way
 we do theory. It's usually more efficient to do theory first and
 implement it systematically once it's done, but sometimes going from
 practice to theory is the only route available.
-
-