Tao: A statically-typed functional language
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#2The promises are great, but will it deliver? It’s seems the language has a really huge scope with lots of hard problems to solve.
The thing I loved about golang was that it’s just “good enough” in lots of areas instead of being the best or perfect. That allowed more time ti works on other parts of an ecosystem.
But since Tao is an hobby project, i just hope the author goes nuts and enjoy working on all those things. It is indeed a cool lang.
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#3I don't understand what the possible use case for using a \ for the final bar for sum types would be. It would just make it a diff to add a new item at the end. I was hoping it had Unicode support looking at the example screenshot, but no, it's just a ligature font confusing users.
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#4The promises are great, but will it deliver? It’s seems the language has a really huge scope with lots of hard problems to solve. The thing I loved about golang was that it’s just “good enough” in lots of areas instead of being the best or perfect. That allowed more time ti works on other parts of an ecosystem. But since Tao is an hobby project, i just hope the author goes nuts and enjoy working on all those things.…
I am indeed "going nuts"!
As mentioned in the README, I don't see Tao as a production-quality language (at least, for the foreseeable future). I'll leave that to the experts. Instead, I'm more interested in exploring the limits of new language design ideas (effect systems in particular). There are already a few interesting things Tao does that I've not seen elsewhere.
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#5I don't understand what the possible use case for using a \ for the final bar for sum types would be. It would just make it a diff to add a new item at the end. I was hoping it had Unicode support looking at the example screenshot, but no, it's just a ligature font confusing users.
Tao isn't indentation-sensitive, so nested `match` expressions are ambiguous without the trailing \ branch.
I don't know whether I'll keep this syntax though. I'm increasingly wondering whether it's better to just bite the bullet and go all in with indentation sensitivity.
That said, the existing \ syntax can be quite nice to read: https://github.com/zesterer/tao/blob/master/lib/parse.tao#L5...
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#6Hardly ever is "good REPL" one of the features of these new languages. Do they think it's irrelevant or is making such a thing too difficult compared to all these more CSy features?
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#7Hardly ever is "good REPL" one of the features of these new languages. Do they think it's irrelevant or is making such a thing too difficult compared to all these more CSy features?
REPLs are often difficult to reconcile with AoT compilation and static analysis, particularly in the context of things like type inference (at least, in a way that preserves semantics). It's on my mental todo list, but not a priority for me.
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#8A few observations:
Seems very ML/Haskell inspired.
All tuples seem to require parenthesis.
Definitely not ergonomic on a qwertz layout (Altough, what language is?)
No current plans for an interactive/repl version it seems
No dependant types either.
Overall, pretty interesting. Definitely warrants a closer look.
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#9So is the language planned to be computationally complete or total?
I was not completely clear on your definition of totality. But I am all for not Turing-complete models of computation that still do useful things.
Re: Tao: A statically-typed functional language
#10Hey, author here. I definitely didn't expect to see Tao on Hacker News. As is probably obvious, the language is extremely early in its life, and it's not practical to write anything but trivial examples in it yet. Please don't judge!