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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?

#221

Post by jiyinyiyong »

jashkenas wrote: post #100
vortico wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your personal opinions on the future of Coffeescript? It's still being used for Atom, but I've noticed colleagues are finally getting used to ES6 and similar languages and switching to them. I'm still stuck on Coffeescript though for all of my frontend projects. It's too closely aligned to my utopia of a language to try to find anything else (which would surely have a smaller following anyway).

My personal opinion is much as it has been from day one: > I'm not about to start using it for real projects, > it's really just a thought experiment about how nice > JavaScript could be with an alternative syntax. (Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014225 ) I've used it a bit for fun, but never for work. And I think that the future of JavaScript is probably always going to be JavaScript — until a web lan…

Using at work even at major product in Teambition Shanghai https://github.com/teambition?language=coffeescript https://github.com/jianliaoim?language=coffeescript

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

#222

Post by carapace »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #176
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…

It's called Universal Systems Language. One of the founders of software engineering also was a pioneer in high-assurance toolkits. A NASA engineer's review showed the tool to have serious usability and performance issues. However, she and her team should get credit for solving the hard problems with a tool that at least worked for some people. It's also written in itself. http://htius.com Edit: The book you mention i…

It's like it went into its own bubble universe. Cheers.

As for the book, I don't know if I can recommend it. I've only ever seen a copy one other time, to check if it mentions Hamilton (it does, in some end notes) and I can't say it lived up to my memories of the first exposure. I can't even say how much of it is actually original to J. Martin and how much is strictly Dr. Hamilton's.

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

#223

Post by jiyinyiyong »

Yes, Cirru, in 2013, which is only a language front-end that compiles to JavaScript, Clojure, JSON or HTML.

* http://cirru.org * text.cirru.org (temporary solution) * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13773813

I was trying to explore the expressiveness of graphical editing(at first using indentations). And it ends up with a nice tree editor that I can editor as DOM. With DOM, the layout of the code is actually the layout of AST controlling by algorithms that is responsive to screen size and AST structure.

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

#224

Post by JustSomeNobody »

howerj wrote: post #91
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #40

Nope, but have always loved playing around with compilers for languages like PL/0, Pascal (subset) and such. I have many books on compiler design[0] but my itch is usually scratched by implementing a subset of a Wirth language as opposed to creating my own. I don't keep anything I write because it's fun to do it all over again later. [0] I think my oldest is "Compiler Construction for Digital Computers" by David Grie…

I've just started writing my own PL/0 compiler, I found the best resource for it (apart from the Wikipedia articles on EBNF, PL/0 and P-Code) is Wirth's book "Compiler Construction" ( http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf ). I don't think later versions of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" contains anything about PL/0 (or a I could not find anything in the contents page). Eitherway, I find Wirth's…

Yes, my understanding is later editions of the book didn't include it.

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

#225

Post by david927 »

cosinetau wrote: post #205
david927 wrote: post #199

Yes, Kayia (kayia.org) because code is not meant to be read, it's meant to be queried, and text files are a ridiculous way to hold information to be queried.

Groovy. Did you write this for actuarial work or something as a replacement for spreadsheets? The philosophy aside, what did you expect the use cases to be?

Thanks! It's kind of a funny story, the innovation isn't really the language but the data structures underneath -- which means I'm going to be pushing it initially as a database (of all things). I'll post more in a month or two.

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

#226

Post by klibertp »

Paul_S wrote: post #41

I created a scripting language for my interactive fiction engine because the existing ones have too many assumptions about gameplay. It's Turing complete with ultra minimalist syntax using punctuation as the few keywords it has.

Is it (the engine) multiplayer capable?

I'm working on a cross between IF and LP-style MUDs with support for graphics and sounds, using Io as both implementation language and scripting language (and probably Nim for GUI once I get to it). The code lives here: https://github.com/piotrklibert/mrtr and is currently a mess, I also got side-tracked and started porting pyparsing to Io to get a nice DSL for parsing user's commands, but the idea has been on my minds for a very long time and I'm determined to finally do something about it.

I'd be happy to learn more about your project and to chat about it if you'd like.

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

#227

Post by nrdwavexe »

a version of scheme from 2013

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6u0pARskZtQNExpdjhfQ0dIbX...

it is a very good exercise to implement a scheme interpreter and LR parser. I have done so many times since 2007 in many different programming languages. It is a very worthwhile exercise that involves variables levels of resistance and some difficult work. The wikipedia article on LR parsers is very helpful.

Why do people train for competitions? There is such a thing as being best at the world at this stuff, but only in the imagination. There is no real "top gun" prize because you don't want these hot shots going insane with jealousy. It's just an idea. Programming languages help you compete without competing.

In the future, people won't create programming languages because the math will have caught up to handle them. As it is, codebreaking math and classified math are holding this back. I think this will change as soon as people get serious about automatic translation of mathematics textbooks such as the Springer-Verlag series (undergraduate and graduate).

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

#228

Post by evincarofautumn »

klibertp wrote: post #219
evincarofautumn wrote: post #159

I’ve been working on a statically typed concatenative programming language, Kitten[1], off and on for a few years now. I plan to do an early release this year. I started working on the language to bring an elegant compositional style to low-level high-performance programming, in the form of a simple language that admits powerful tooling for program editing and visualisation. I also wanted to address usability concern…

Oh, it's good to see you. I'd like to say that I'm "following" (mostly limited to looking at the kittenlang.org every couple of months, but still) your project and I'm quite interested in it. After learning about concatenative languages a couple of years ago I started learning Forth and later Factor. I wanted to give Joy a try, but IIRC I couldn't make it run and, after that, I stumbled upon Cat. But Cat was written…

Thanks for taking an interest. :)

I guess it’s still in a “promising but very incomplete” state. Lately I have a pretty clear sense of how I want the language to be, and people seem pretty excited about it. It’s just a matter of finding the energy to do the work…

Also, follow the repo if you want updates. The website hasn’t been updated in like 2 years, and probably won’t be until I need to prepare for a release.

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

#229

Post by leafo »

sidegrid wrote: post #145
leafo wrote: post #92

I created a language called MoonScript in 2011 It is heavily inspired by CoffeeScript (and Python), it works as a transpiler for Lua. I've since used it regularly to code dozens of projects. It's now powering my company along with a handful of websites and supporting libraries. I've also made games and GUI apps with it. The adoption has been pretty minimal, but I'm satisfied regardless. It has definitely improved my…

MoonScript is extremely cool. What are your thoughts on MoonScript in the browser? I know you have an online "Try MoonScript", but what would be the best way to use it in a real (hobby) project with DOM manipulation capabilities? Please don't give up on MoonScript :)

MoonScript is designed to compile to Lua, and there are no good ways to run Lua in the browser right now. It's impossible to write a Lua -> JS transpiler while matching all the same functionality (coroutines), so the only option is to run the entire Lua vm in the browser (The MoonScript online version uses this approach with emscripten).

In the future I'd like to be able to run MoonScript in the browser, maybe web assembly is the answer.

Another option would be to have a JS target for the MoonScript compiler, but there are some issues with different language features that would make code sharing difficult (1 indexed arrays, metatables, etc.)

I have no plans to give up moonscript. I haven't been actively developing it recently though, which I feel guilty about.

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

#230

Post by DenisM »

jswrenn wrote: post #54

Although I am not the creator of it, I am a frequent contributor to Pyret [0], (I'm the error message czar, and prototyped the language support for tabular data). Beyond that: Writing an interpreter is typically the first thing I do when I am trying to pick up a new language. To anyone interested in learning how to design and implement a programming language, I highly recommend the 2015 offering of Brown's "Programmi…

Type inference is exactly what I need for my new language! Thank you!
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