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Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

cell-lang.net

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Re: Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

#22
Very interesting.

In my domain of backend business rule + SQL development I think a perfect programming language would combine ideas from "Out of the tar pit" with event sourcing.

So perhaps something in sort of the same direction as Cell, but also focused on state changing (really, aggregate computation) from certain events having happened...

Re: Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

#23
post #6

It's frustrating that innovators are constantly having to justify "why yet another". Folks should just be able to freely innovate without fear of getting spammed with xkcd#927. You wanna make yet another programming language, compiler, JSON-alternative, container format, or trivial FTP+SVN killer, go for it! This is how we innovate.

IMO it’s important to distinguish between projects that are following a well beaten path just to follow it (I.e. writing a toy lisp), and projects that are intentionally trailblazing. If you want to find innovation you want to follow the later projects rather than the former.

Re: Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

#24
post #4

So basically an actor system with relations between actors, reactivity and automatic persistence. Very interesting concept! Although I do wonder if this couldn't be implemented as a library for an existing language. Doesn't seem like it is actively developed though, the compiler repo hasn't seen updates since November and the runtime repo since 2018.

temporal.io = durable actors for microservices workflows

Trying to understand what this is. A kind of Erlang runtime for Go/Java/PHP/TS?

Re: Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

temporal.io = durable actors for microservices workflows

Trying to understand what this is. A kind of Erlang runtime for Go/Java/PHP/TS?

Ok, found a good explanation now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30368838

Re: Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

#27
post #21

> Why yet another programming language? 'Because I wanted to' is a sufficient reason. Create all the programming languages you want and share it with the world!

I know some people are afraid of change and competition, but I'm thrilled everytime someone shares their new language or library. I don't have to learn or use them all, but it's great to basically have unlimited research and approaches to skim on github/gitlab/etc.. for any language and any problem.

Re: Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

#28
post #21

> Why yet another programming language? 'Because I wanted to' is a sufficient reason. Create all the programming languages you want and share it with the world!

I know some people are afraid of change and competition, but I'm thrilled everytime someone shares their new language or library. I don't have to learn or use them all, but it's great to basically have unlimited research and approaches to skim on github/gitlab/etc.. for any language and any problem.

Programming languages can be similar to bacterial DNA. Even if the language never gains broad acceptance, parts of it may be incorporated into other languages.

Re: Cell Lang: Why yet another programming language?

#29

I too am disappointed by the lack of innovation around state management in applications. But I don't think this solves the problem. A lot of developers think what we need is additional abstraction on top of the way data is stored and retrieved, to remove all the annoying CRUD boilerplate that goes into building an app. This seems to make sense because devs think in terms of simple examples like TODO lists. But in a r…

> But in a real production application with heavy scale, you need a lot of low-level control over precisely how state is managed.

Very much this. "State is managed automatically!" can very quickly become "this frequent operation is automatically doing a huge amount of DB work which should actually be deferred until later"

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