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Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#181

Post by ng12 »

gmac wrote: post #177
STRML wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say thank you for CoffeeScript. Despite its somewhat ambiguous syntax it really was a better version of JavaScript, and it would be fair to say it really mainstreamed the idea of JS as a target language. Many of the ideas in CS made it all the way to ES6. Many other ideas didn't make it to ES6 because CS fleshed out issues that quite possibly would have been missed otherwise. It was a huge net positive…

Ditto. CoffeeScript made JS almost Ruby-level fun for me. I've now switched mainly to TypeScript, which is also great (so many fewer runtime errors!). But I still miss thin arrow functions, array comprehensions, the existential operator ... What I really want these days is CoffeeScript on top of TypeScript.

Same. Idiomatic Coffeescript was so much fun it gave me a borderline obsession with brevity. Array comprehensions also largely removed the need for lodash/underscore.

Give me an optionally typed, ES6-flavored Coffeescript and I'll be a happy developer.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#182

Post by patrec »

wrs wrote: post #174

I made NewtonScript, starting in 1992. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewtonScript ) The other viable choice was to have application developers write everything for the Newton in C or C++. By giving them a much higher-level framework (Scheme/Self-like language + UI views/interaction + indexed object store) we were able to get more functionality into the product/ecosystem faster and more reliably. At least I think so…

Is there anything in Newton script you miss in current languages, or wish that would be more widely adopted?

Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#183

Post by jacquesm »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

Yes, about 10 years ago for a company that was in the financial risk management space. We were going for a matlab like language but R and Octave weren't deemed ready. For those of you who are already objecting in your head, I'll grant you that I'm not sure we made a good choice here but this was the early 2000s:( What we were after was a vectorized language that would let you write your quant formulas without having…

How close did you get to re-implementing APL?

Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#185

Post by jacquesm »

znpy wrote: post #175
carapace wrote: post #160

Long ago I found a copy of "System Design from Provably Correct Constructs" at the Seattle public library. I didn't realize it at the time but I now know that it is basically a presentation of Dr. Margaret Hamilton's Higher-Order Software ideas. In essence it's a thin AST that is only modified by operations that preserve certain kinds of correctness (i.e. type safety), with a tiny core of essential combinators that a…

commenting for future reference.

Your browser has 'ctrl-d' and if you click the 'item' link (the timestamp) then you can 'favorite' that link within HN. That way you don't need to clutter up threads with comments like these.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#186

Post by jacquesm »

talles wrote: post #184
WalterBright wrote: post #167

I created D because I could implement new ideas without waiting years.

What do you mean?

D is a successor to (you've guessed it) 'C'.

If you've ever used Zortech C++ then you've used Walter's product.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#187

Post by dairgram »

Yes, in the late 80's, I was frustrated how slow PL/M was to compile even the most trivial program (order of 5 minutes for DO ... END). I developed PLD which had had fast compile as its objective. I separated all tokens with spaces and code was strictly left to right (e.g A + B -> C ; rather than C = A+B;). The first self-compiler was about 1500 lines and self-compiled (after some optimizing) in about 45 seconds on same hardware as PL/M above.

Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#188

Post by jkaptur »

At the bank I used to work at, traders had a habit of wandering over and asking questions about the differences between the prices of securities over time (as arbitrageurs, it's all they thought about).

I got so sick of writing one-off SQL queries that I wrote a very small (not much bigger than a calculator) language to express their questions. They liked it, but it had no potential for use outside of our trading desk (which was disbanded a few years later).

Re: Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?

#190

Post by murbard2 »

tromp wrote: post #163
murbard2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I once read that only an exponentially small fraction of binary strings are valid BLC programs. In theory this means you could create shorter programs by merely enumerating valid BLC programs, which is bothersome. Is this a correct characterization and do you see a fix? EDIT: there's the paper https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-functiona... citing an exponent of 1.963447954...

> I think I once read that only an exponentially small fraction of binary strings are valid BLC programs This is true for the encoded lambda calculus prefix; but not for the entire BLC program in which you can embed arbitrary binary data. > In theory this means you could create shorter programs Not really; BLC is universal, so program sizes are optimal up to a constant. In other words, for any language L, there's a c…

Cool, I was wondering that. So you confirm that I can embed arbitrary binary data in a BLC program with only a constant overhead?
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