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Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

yon-lang.org

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Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

#14

Post by z4lis »

You must not mix up technical mathematical words with softer prose words. For instance, "Yon's data model is categorical. A world is a category, a semantic site;"

So if you want to define a world, I expect you to tell me how to supply objects + morphisms + the composition law + the site structure. I don't know what a "semantic site" is, just what a "site" is. You'd need to define it. Anyway, we then get to our first examples of declaring worlds:

  world Currency { Code is EUR, USD }
  world Status { State is on, off }
This maybe gives me the first bit of data we need for a site. Definitely not the rest. Then we hit this

  world Sub subset of Currency
Two issues with this. One is stylistic. Why on earth would you call it a "subset"? It's not a set! "subworld" is the obvious choice... But the real issue is that like the initial definition, this doesn't tell me how to build `Sub`. I need to know which objects and morphisms of Currency to include into the category Sub? What's the site structure?

So now I think, "OK, maybe you just declare part of the structure and fill it in later, before you actually use it..."

But then your example disproves that notion! You have

  world Shop { Code is X }

  place Account in Shop {
    balance number
    owner String
  }
with no mention of Account when you declared Shop, I'm still not sure what Code or X are, and then you give what is seemingly supposed to be some working code

  fun main(): number {
    be a holds new Account { balance 40 owner "ada" }
    be _p holds String.print(a.owner)
    return a.balance + 2
  }
So your motivating example really kills off the interest from your two main communities that would use this thing: 1) category theorists have no idea what you're talking about, because nothing here looks like categories - there are no morphisms, no site structure 2) computer/software folks look at your example and think "why on earth would I learn topos theory to do something that sure looks like OOP"

I think a "topos inspired programming language" would be kind of cool if you could pull it off, but I think you really need to figure out how to sell it in the docs to at least one of the two communities above.

Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

#15

Post by esafak »

jrmg wrote: post #5

Just a comment: this sounds a lot like when someone I knew mildly succumbed to AI psychosis, and thought he, with Gemini, had made some physics/metaphysics breakthrough. If you’re losing sleep and feeling distressed or euphoric, maybe lay off for a few days, no matter how hard that is. Talk to friends and/or family about unimportant things. Get outside for a while. Go back to old hobbies (reading, hiking, just going…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice

Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

#16

Post by Retr0id »

> exactly 196,560 slots per heap

> Allocation hashes the bytes; identical content returns the existing slot

What happens when two distinct objects hash to the same slot? (This is inevitable by the pigeonhole principle, and highly likely even at modest object counts due to the Birthday problem)

Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

#17

Post by skulk »

mccoyb wrote: post #3

I'm not sure where or how to convey this, because I've seen several of these languages designed with AI, documentation created using AI, etc -- posted on Hacker News in the last months or so, and I've responded to each one with roughly the same feedback (and I'm assuming good faith: that the intent is that the poster wishes to grow as a language designer). Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be tre…

> Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect.

I just want to amplify this point. As I was reading this, the LLMisms kept jumping out at me and each one felt like the author looking at me and deciding that my time spent reading this prose wasn't actually worth anything to them.

OP: I want YOUR thoughts, not the next token predictions of a gigantic pile of matrix multiplications. I want your awkward sentences, grammar mistakes, half-baked thoughts, self-doubt, silly jokes. I don't want this pile of grandiose mechanical slop completely devoid of humanity.

Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

#18

Post by Retr0id »

wavemode wrote: post #6

> No garbage collector > Slots are stable for the life of the process; the heap grows with distinct content only. So how is a program supposed to handle lots of unique content? Like a web server handling user requests?

Taking it at face value, you'd spawn a subprocess to handle each web request and exit once it's done.

Re: Yon – a topos-oriented language with a content-addressed lattice heap

#19

Post by jrmg »

esafak wrote: post #8

Could you name a few languages you had in mind while developing this, their respective problems, and how your language improves them, feature by feature? > Yon allocates into xleech2, a content-addressed heap whose geometry is the Leech lattice Λ24: exactly 196,560 slots per heap. What is the computational complexity of memory allocation into this Leech lattice? What applications did you have in mind where making all…

I have trouble with the idea that these lattice structures could be less computationally complex or less likely to collide than a good simple hash table. I guess they could be more guaranteed to have stable access times?

The more I try to understand, the more it appears that they are a hash table (hash-addressed-structure to be pedantic), but with way more complicated backing than a hash table.

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