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Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

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Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#71

Post by nickpsecurity »

GregBuchholz wrote: post #11

I think you'd probably be interested by the Viewpoint Research (and Alan Kay): http://vpri.org/index.html ...and STEPS: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf "We set a limit of 20,000 lines of code to express all of the “runnable meaning” of personal computing (“from the end‑user down to the metal”) where “runnable meaning” means that the system will run with just this code (but could have added optimizations…

I'd enjoy seeing Niklaus Wirth's reaction to that project beating him at his own game from the other side of language design. My reaction to it is similar to my reaction to reading Wirth and Jurg's work on Lilith a long time ago.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#72

Post by zyxzevn »

Unseen

A Functional and Logical Dataflow language.

http://www.reddit.com/r/unseen_programming

Status: under development.

Functions are components, which can be used recursively. Arrows are logical relations between these functions. Inspired by Scala and VHDL.

The logic and flow deal with the control and time aspect.

Testing and commenting is integrated in the graphical system as different layers. All graphical structures can be converted to (reasonably) simple text, resembling Scala.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#73

Post by nickpsecurity »

protomyth wrote: post #36

I still think there is something to agent oriented programming. Yoav Shoham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoav_Shoham http://www.infor.uva.es/~cllamas/MAS/AOP-Shoham.pdf http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/

I used to do that back when I was investigating and toying with AI. Had a whole book dedicated to all the ways one could apply it. One use case was to send an agent over our slow, expensive connections to where the data was to do work for a price and bring just the results back. Since then, our connections and machines have gotten fast. Yet, HN posts show the concept lives on in cloud services doing datamining and stuff for a new reason: pulling a lot of data out of the cloud costs a fortune vs pulling just the results of on-premises analysis.

Agent-oriented programming lives on today in a new form. Just dawned on me as I saw your post. :)

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#74

Post by marknadal »

I think "visual" programming is the incorrect approach, something I would like to see more of is "tactile-spatial" programming. Anybody have an example of these? Most work I've seen is visual/flowchart which is not optimal for touch devices or large projects.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#75

Post by nickpsecurity »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #2

This is a really broad question, about on par with asking "which fashion houses are putting out daring material and what will Dior be making that's popular 30 years from now". Software is just like any other cargo-cult industry where trends rise and fall almost like clockwork. From Rails, to Angular, to React. RE: People/Groups who are researching 'new approaches to programming' - you have the typical universities pu…

In hardware, a bit of the opposite is happening: big companies are paying Intel, AMD, Cavium, etc more money for semi-custom SOC's that combine multi-core CPU's and HW accelerators. There's also more uptake of FPGA hardware, which necessitates new programming paradigms and tools for SW types. And nobody working at this level uses Rails or whatever lol. They actually want to use the hardware they buy.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#76

Post by sarmad »

teraflop wrote: post #53
sarmad wrote: post #49

I am. I am working on a new programming language designed for the next generations. The language re-imagines the role of the compiler from being a monolithic static blackbox that converts source to executable, into being an open dynamic system the manages the language syntax and compilation process, but leaves the final syntax and actual compilation to hot pluggable libraries. Why? To make the language dynamically up…

I read the links; your language looks interesting, but could you expand a bit on what makes it a new approach? User-programmable syntax is an old idea; for instance, it's been a core feature of Scheme for 30+ years.

My language is not only about user defined syntax; it's also about user defined code generation. For example, you can define your own syntax that compiles directly into a DB stored procedure or into GPU shader, or into whatever technology that might be invented in the future, like for example quantum computing. In fact, it's less about user defined syntax than it is about user defined code generation as I am trying to limit new syntax into certain patterns rather than leave it in the wild.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#78

Post by sarmad »

dTal wrote: post #61
sarmad wrote: post #49

I am. I am working on a new programming language designed for the next generations. The language re-imagines the role of the compiler from being a monolithic static blackbox that converts source to executable, into being an open dynamic system the manages the language syntax and compilation process, but leaves the final syntax and actual compilation to hot pluggable libraries. Why? To make the language dynamically up…

Oh man, this is exactly what I've been thinking about lately (though I think it should be built on something like Scheme). The more research I do, the more it seems like a Hard Problem. In a nutshell, how do you handle inherently ambiguous composed grammars? Do you see your system being flexible enough to be able to essentially "behave like" arbitrary existing languages? It would be very easy to port things to it if…

It's not my goal to make the system able to parse arbitrary existing languages. The parser can deal with ambiguity by branching parsing states, but despite that it still won't be easy to parse inherently ambiguous grammars, and even if that was easy to do I still would push against it as that would be in conflict with the language's goal of unifying different programming areas under one language with consistent syntax. It wouldn't be much useful language if your code is written like c++ in one place and like, say, Ruby or SQL in another. You need your code to be consistent and the language to be consistent as well, otherwise learning the language would be difficult and understanding the fragmented user code would also be difficult. The main benefit behind being able to parse existing languages is for porting existing code, but that can be done using external conversion tools.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#79

Post by pshc »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #21

Me. I'm working on Full Metal Jacket, a strongly-typed, visual, pure dataflow language ( http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html ) with its own IDE. Things have advanced a fair bit since I wrote those pages, and published the recent paper, so I'll add to the tutorials very soon, and announce this in Hacker News. Type definition, macros, and a few other things have been added to the language. .303 shared-source rele…

I'm working on something slightly similar.

But I'm sticking with the keyboard. And the "visuals" will still be text, with the option of other visualizations. Keyboard+text scales better than anything else.

Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?

#80

Post by _mhr_ »

My primary concern is with personal knowledge bases [1]. This intersects with new approaches to programming, because programs and algorithms are an aspect of and a way of interacting with knowledge.

It's mostly conceptual right now, but my idea is to represent knowledge as a hypergraph with spatial and temporal dimensions on both edges and vertices. This, I hope, could represent every kind of knowledge I can imagine. The hypergraph would function as a filesystem and database, and you could query/program the system. It would be Emacs for all media, and not just text.

I want to augment the inherent power of the hypergraph with a mashup of the OpenEndedGroup's Field, Xerox PARC's Smalltalk, Doug Engelbart's NLS, Symbolics' Open Genera, org-mode, Vim, the Wolfram Language, Bell Labs' Plan 9, and Ted Nelson's ZigZag and Xanadu projects.

If anyone finds this interesting and wants to chat about this stuff, please email me at the email address in my profile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_base

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