Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed • Hacker News Board

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#21

Post by TheDong » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #19

tnowacki wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IO is managed through very specific native extensions where updates to that IO source are able to be tracked outside of the language and fed back in. For example, we don't have anything that lets you read from command line or stdin. But you can open and watch a file. Any changes to that file will be tracked by the runtime. Other non deterministic computation, like randomness or time is outright banned in the tracked…

> For example, we don't have anything that lets you read from command line or stdin. But you can open and watch a file. whats the difference between opening a file and watching it and watching stdin?

inotify and seek works on most files.

FIFO file descriptors, not so much.

If you can't seek backwards, you pretty much have to cache the whole contents in memory, which seems wildly inefficient.

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#22

Post by aylmao » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

fusiongyro wrote: post #13

jverlaguet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add that I intend to maintain it and build a community around it in outside of FB as it is mentioned on the front-page. "The language, compiler and libraries are maintained as a side project by Julien Verlaguet, the main designer of the language."

How does your language compare to the glut of modern systems-ish languages like Rust, Go, Swift, Julia, Nim? I see a lot of C++ influence here. Your docs don't explain how you make parallelism ergonomic, but the "async" keyword is getting popular. Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum?

> Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum?

FWIW I don't think anyone is claiming you should, especially given it's not under active development (:

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#23

Post by adamnemecek » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

tnowacki wrote: post #17

adamnemecek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the footer. CTRL + F for specification.

I'll look into removing it. If you want an overview of language features/design. I'd start with the docs: http://skiplang.com/docs/hello_world.html

Can I email you?

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#24

Post by jverlaguet » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

fusiongyro wrote: post #13

jverlaguet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add that I intend to maintain it and build a community around it in outside of FB as it is mentioned on the front-page. "The language, compiler and libraries are maintained as a side project by Julien Verlaguet, the main designer of the language."

How does your language compare to the glut of modern systems-ish languages like Rust, Go, Swift, Julia, Nim? I see a lot of C++ influence here. Your docs don't explain how you make parallelism ergonomic, but the "async" keyword is getting popular. Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum?

Skip is not meant to be a system programming language. So the comparison with Rust for example is difficult.

> "I see a lot of C++ influence" I don't see what gave you that impression. Perhaps the syntax? But I don't think it looks more like C++ than Java or C#.

> Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum?

There are several reasons, but of course I am biased: 1- builtin cache invalidation 2- safe parallelism 3- predictable GC

While 2-3 can be found in other languages, I think I can argue that 1 is very unique to skip.

The other thing is, what are you trying to build? If you what you want to do is to develop an incremental tool, then Skip is probably the best option out there right now.

Let's say you decided tomorrow to build a fully incremental C++ front-end, to support auto-complete for example (I chose C++ because it is notoriously complex). What would you write this in? I think Skip should be the language of choice.

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#25

Post by jverlaguet » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

aylmao wrote: post #22

fusiongyro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your language compare to the glut of modern systems-ish languages like Rust, Go, Swift, Julia, Nim? I see a lot of C++ influence here. Your docs don't explain how you make parallelism ergonomic, but the "async" keyword is getting popular. Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum?

> Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum? FWIW I don't think anyone is claiming you should, especially given it's not under active development (:

That's not exactly true. It's not under active development at Facebook. I still intend to work on Skip as it is said on the front-page: "The language, compiler and libraries are maintained as a side project by Julien Verlaguet, the main designer of the language."

And I am looking for people to help ;-)

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#26

Post by fusiongyro » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

jverlaguet wrote: post #24

fusiongyro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your language compare to the glut of modern systems-ish languages like Rust, Go, Swift, Julia, Nim? I see a lot of C++ influence here. Your docs don't explain how you make parallelism ergonomic, but the "async" keyword is getting popular. Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum?

Skip is not meant to be a system programming language. So the comparison with Rust for example is difficult. > "I see a lot of C++ influence" I don't see what gave you that impression. Perhaps the syntax? But I don't think it looks more like C++ than Java or C#. > Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum? There are several reasons, but of course I am biased: 1-…

You have a doc section named "Lvalues." Nobody talks about lvalues outside C++.

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#27

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

Does skip target js just through emscripten? Does it have good support for browser interaction?

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#28

Post by dmix » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

jverlaguet wrote: post #25

aylmao wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum? FWIW I don't think anyone is claiming you should, especially given it's not under active development (:

That's not exactly true. It's not under active development at Facebook. I still intend to work on Skip as it is said on the front-page: "The language, compiler and libraries are maintained as a side project by Julien Verlaguet, the main designer of the language." And I am looking for people to help ;-)

This was an unfortunate choice of wording, that maybe should be updated:

> The Skip project concluded in 2018 and Skip is no longer under active development at Facebook.

This makes it sound like the project was killed off entirely, as it mentions its 'concluded'.

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#29

Post by lkschubert8 » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

fusiongyro wrote: post #13

jverlaguet wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to add that I intend to maintain it and build a community around it in outside of FB as it is mentioned on the front-page. "The language, compiler and libraries are maintained as a side project by Julien Verlaguet, the main designer of the language."

How does your language compare to the glut of modern systems-ish languages like Rust, Go, Swift, Julia, Nim? I see a lot of C++ influence here. Your docs don't explain how you make parallelism ergonomic, but the "async" keyword is getting popular. Why would I choose to invest in your language over one of these other ones that has more momentum?

Under Safe Parallelism it says

Skip supports ergonomic asynchronous computation with async/await syntax

Re: Skip – A programming language to skip the things you have already computed

#30

Post by trurl » Wed, Sep 26, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #28

jverlaguet wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly true. It's not under active development at Facebook. I still intend to work on Skip as it is said on the front-page: "The language, compiler and libraries are maintained as a side project by Julien Verlaguet, the main designer of the language." And I am looking for people to help ;-)

This was an unfortunate choice of wording, that maybe should be updated: > The Skip project concluded in 2018 and Skip is no longer under active development at Facebook. This makes it sound like the project was killed off entirely, as it mentions its 'concluded'.

The key question for me is what about the project made Facebook uninterested in using the language or continuing development. On paper, Skip sounds quite compelling, so I assume there is some reason, if just politics.