Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
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Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#2I admire people who make projects like this. But it is so alien to me to try making something like a language.
What is the motivation, and the goal? Surely it is practically a one-in-a-million chance to actually unseat Python or bash or Lua. I could never really justify using something like Buzz in a professional setting, just because it is too obscure and new.
And look - if it is just for the joy of it, I get it! But I wonder if there is ambition in there too.
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#3What should I be looking for here that distinguishes it from other lightweight statically-typed scripting languages? Performance? Tooling? Particularly good FFI?
There are some syntactic quirks that don't convey any obvious benefit, like the use of '>' to indicate a return type. Since this language uses C-style prefixed type identifiers, why not do that for functions as well? Alternately, why not use the much more common ':' or even '->'? The use of a doubled return type (`> str > int`) to indicate yields is obscure, and the fact that the second type is the yielded type is surprising (yields come before the final return, so I'd expect the types to be in the same order).
Similarly, I understand the mimetic quality of '[str]' for 'array of str', but '{str, int}' doesn't have the same ring since key/value pairs are separated by ':'.
Comments starting with '|' feels like pure quirk. I don't really mind quirk in a tiny language like this, but there's a point where "funny syntax" becomes a bigger takeaway from the documentation than any actual features.
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#4FYI, for the interested, https://github.com/buzz-language/buzz/issues/209
> You have to use the nightly build of zig.
ie. `brew install zig && zig build` will not work.
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#5Not explicitly mentioned in the guide, but Buzz has a garbage collector [1] (can also be inferred via a casual mention of upvalues). So it has more focus on scripting than static typing I guess, but the language design doesn't look so to me.
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#6I admire people who make projects like this. But it is so alien to me to try making something like a language. What is the motivation, and the goal? Surely it is practically a one-in-a-million chance to actually unseat Python or bash or Lua. I could never really justify using something like Buzz in a professional setting, just because it is too obscure and new. And look - if it is just for the joy of it, I get it! Bu…
It's useful to have embeddable languages that fit one's preferred style and featureset. It's also not as hard to implement as you'd think. Common usages are anything requiring configurable behavior: game scripting, feature extension, distributed computing plugins, etc.
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#7I mean this looks awesome and all but I feel like constantly developing/learning new languages and frameworks has been such a giant waste of resources in our community in general. I hope things stabilize in the future. I've got 15 professional years under my belt at this point and I don't feel like an expert in anything.
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#8The comments here are so bitter.
I love the syntax and will definitely try the language
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#9I admire people who make projects like this. But it is so alien to me to try making something like a language. What is the motivation, and the goal? Surely it is practically a one-in-a-million chance to actually unseat Python or bash or Lua. I could never really justify using something like Buzz in a professional setting, just because it is too obscure and new. And look - if it is just for the joy of it, I get it! Bu…
> actually unseat Python or bash or Lua
These languages each have enough warts that lots of people and languages are chipping away at them.
Go and Nim are doing the strong static typing that "feels like scripting" thing. Even Rust is making a bit of a dent, despite it being a systems language with memory semantics.
There's plenty of room for all sorts of projects to try. Don't count anyone out. Even if the language never gains momentum, its ideas or developers might have some other effect. And even Nimrod was once in this state.
Re: Buzz: A lightweight statically typed scripting language
#10I admire people who make projects like this. But it is so alien to me to try making something like a language. What is the motivation, and the goal? Surely it is practically a one-in-a-million chance to actually unseat Python or bash or Lua. I could never really justify using something like Buzz in a professional setting, just because it is too obscure and new. And look - if it is just for the joy of it, I get it! Bu…
> actually unseat Python or bash or Lua These languages each have enough warts that lots of people and languages are chipping away at them. Go and Nim are doing the strong static typing that "feels like scripting" thing. Even Rust is making a bit of a dent, despite it being a systems language with memory semantics. There's plenty of room for all sorts of projects to try. Don't count anyone out. Even if the language n…
This is an excellent point and I think that while most languages will fade away in time, if they even contribute one new idea the project is worthwhile. If we had asked programmers in 1991 what the point of Python was, the responses would have probably been similar to the parent comment, and look at where it is now.
I played around with Vala (a C# style language that compiled to C on Linux) back in 2010 and while I never used it for anything serious, it was fun to try out new ideas and see how they could work. There is value in these projects, maybe some of it will carry over into other languages, in others they may be the dominant language in 10 years.