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The Bosque Programming Language

microsoft.com

51–60 of 172 posts

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#51
post #17
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree, some do.

How dare you disagree? Now I will start a completely unrelated rant about how disagreement is the root cause of all evil and is indeed the real scourge on the face of the earth. (And not multiple programming languages, that some poor soul is falsely led to believe. Just think about it, we have more than one programming language because a misguided fellow disagreed that rocks and stones are the ideal way to program. S…

Wait, wait, hold on. How dare you disagree with my disagreement and deflect back to programing languages to make a point. Now I am going to read your post carefully and point out spelling and grammar mistakes - but before I do that I have to spend some extra time making sure my post is free of them.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#53

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

There's an English error on the very first sentence of the description on the Microsoft site.

The error is a missing word if anyone is wondering.

"The Bosque programming language is designed for writing code that _is_ simple, obvious, and easy to reason about for both humans and machines."

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#54
post #20

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

I hope you do not mind, if I make some comments. The first is that you should try to include realistic examples in your documentation and promote good coding styles. For example, I do not see the benefit of a 'sign' function with an optional argument. Or have a 'sign' function that uses a local variable, while this could also be done with an if-statement or the ?-operator. I do not understand the concept op typed str…

>I do not see the benefit of a 'sign' function with an optional argument

Perhaps you don't see the benefit of an identity function either ("why not just use the variable")?

Encapsulating things in a function instead of a statement is key to certain patterns (and functional style).

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#55
post #27

A random thought about the code samples. What do we gain from having to write point instead of other languages' point.y = value ? I believe that syntax should be designed to make things simple for developers, not for the designers of languages or for compilers.

I don't know anything about the language but the first form suggests immutability (return a new point with the y property = to value), the second looks like mutating a struct

I don't see anything intrinsically different about the two. If anything the established notation of mathematics for hundreds of years is that '=' implies immutability.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#56

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

Hello! Disclaimer: I haven’t read the full publication yet and I’ve only skimmed it. A lot of programming languages that are coming out these days talk about simplicity, lowering “cognitive load”, increasing expressiveness, being nimble/lightweight/easy/whatever, and—this one stated by you—reducing “accidental complexity”. When I looked at your grammar and some examples, I saw atomic building blocks that don’t lead t…

>To me, “accidental complexity” doesn’t seem like a very well defined concept. I might say such a term in a meeting room arguing to upper management that we need to pay off tech debt. Or I might blog using such a term to talk vaguely philosophically about software engineering. But I don’t think I’d find myself using it in a formal context to argue the merits (or lack thereof) of a technology.

That sounds bizarro. Accidental complexity is pretty obvious to show in an example of a function or an application architecture or class.

It might be harder to define in abstract (except as e.g. "complexity not imposed inevitably by the functionality/problem domain"), but it's very easily observable in specific code examples.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#57

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

There's an English error on the very first sentence of the description on the Microsoft site.

So what?

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#58
post #37

Hi project owner (Mark) here. It is a bit late in the evening for me but I will try to answer any questions when I can. The Bosque language is currently in a very early state with lots of work to do and not ready for practical use. However, I am very excited by the potential in the concepts and wanted to make the project a collaborative endeavor, including both other academics and developer community, from the start.…

Hello, no offense but the community here is bikeshedding. I'd suggest you to discuss this at /r/programming

Sounds offensive to me.

First of all, the community here discusses the post, and whatever they like about the language and announcement -- and whatever they think of tied (loosely or not, to that).

We're not here as some committee with some explicit purpose to give relevant PL criticism.

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you comment on how you came up with the name, or its meaning?

It is a Spanish word used in the SouthWest US for forest along a river. No particular reason behind the name, just a unique and easily searchable choice.

Oh okay. I thought it might have something to do with Basque:

"Basque is a language spoken in the Basque Country, a region that straddles the westernmost Pyrenees in adjacent parts of northern Spain and southwestern France. Linguistically, Basque is unrelated to the other languages of Europe and is a language isolate to any other known living language."

I didn't know about the forest meaning at all. (Maybe a subconscious influence, if you've ever heard any reference to Basque.)

Re: The Bosque Programming Language

#60

> Thus, Bosque does not have any undefined behavior I think this is the one that should be highlighted most. Otherwise, from an engineering perspective, many of the other language features have already been implemented and widely used in other languages

I think I remember someone talk about undefined behavior in specifications and how it is actually a good thing, in the sense that offers increased liberty for implementations and some other advantages. Anybody else has heard this? Don't quite remember where I read it. My humble opinion aligns with yours, it seems intuitively "better" to have no undefined behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undefined_behavior#Risk…

Yes, I've heard the same thing. The C and C++ specifications specifically mention that some things are undefined behaivour, that shows that its not something that slipped through the cracks (at least in those cases) but rather a conscious decision to leave it undefined. This only makes sense if its done to allow the compiler room to do things like aggressive optimisation.

I only wish that undefined behaviour in C++ were harder to accidentally use, or at least, if the compiler warned me "hey, I'm gonna do X here because that undefined behaviour here allows me to do so, this may not be portable to other compilers and may not be what you wanted, you've been warned!"

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