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EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

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Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#61

Post by pjmlp »

ModernMech wrote: post #54
Panzerschrek wrote: post #19

I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something…

How can you say that when millions of non-programmers are using AI to write programs all of a sudden? The problem isn't with non programmers it's with the languages they've been given are usually written by people who are keen to write languages that conform to their sensibilities rather than the programmer's. For example: I would say that 1-based indexing is pretty much required for a language targeting non-develope…

> Most PL devs refuse to do this citing how unnatural it is for themselves to reason about, and how Dijkstra was right about the beauty of 0-based indexes

Thankfully I learnt to program back in the days where languages could go both ways, or even better you could explicitly set the lower and upper bounds.

Thus as programmer I never agreed with him.

And it isn't as if programmers of some famous 0 based index languages don't do indexing errors all the time.

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#62

Post by saghm »

klez wrote: post #26
saghm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't we invent the word "devops" specifically for the combination of work of development and ops? How did we get to the point where we now need a word for "development without the ops"?

That's still not what this is about. Take the example in the article: people who don't write code 100% of the time but have to think about mechanical and electrical engineering consideration for most of the time. You don't describe that as DevOps.

Sure, but that doesn't seem anywhere in the realm of "I need to know what's on my $PATH or how to set up a security group in AWS"

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#63

Post by saghm »

pmontra wrote: post #17
saghm wrote: post #14

> Sympathy for the machine only exists in developers. They will happily explain why integer overflows need to happen. The average human response to integer overflows is “WTF, that’s not how numbers work”. We have BigInt and 99% of the time the WTF response is the correct one. Forget sympathy for the machine; the real reason we need programming languages that prevent issues because we should have sympathy for the poor…

About your question > how many variables can you really remember at once? and our brain being a bad runtime for programming: I started programming on a Sinclair ZX81 with 1 kB of RAM. I wrote my program on paper, reasoned about it by tracing variables on paper and eventually I typed in the program on the keyboard and run it. That was much better than typing line numbers and BASIC commands directly into the REPL. Of c…

I'd argue that using a pencil and paper (which is a totally reasonable thing!) is not really your memory at that point. Augmenting our hardware with peripherals is a useful technique, but it doesn't fundamentally change the constraints; like in "regular" hardware, you're now paying even more per cycle with the equivalent to looking up on an external disk.

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#64

Post by saghm »

renox wrote: post #35
saghm wrote: post #14

> Sympathy for the machine only exists in developers. They will happily explain why integer overflows need to happen. The average human response to integer overflows is “WTF, that’s not how numbers work”. We have BigInt and 99% of the time the WTF response is the correct one. Forget sympathy for the machine; the real reason we need programming languages that prevent issues because we should have sympathy for the poor…

This part is very bad, 99% of the time if you overflow a 64 bit variable it is because you did the wrong computation , not because you need BigInts..

I'm not sure I can remember any time I messed up by using a 64-bit int rather than a BigInt. I can remember plenty of times I should have either just used saturating add/subtract or was trying to compute something that was basically nonsense regardless of what integer width or operation I was doing

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#65

Post by desireco42 »

crowdhailer wrote: post #32
desireco42 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I poked around... this is really interesting. So you take language in text and make IR, but also could be made IR directly. That is very interesting. Potentially I could make a version without curly braces or some weird syntax and it could be compiled in IR and still be same language :). Kind of like MS and VB and C# haha. I like what you did so far, I will keep an eye, maybe help if I can.

I have a few weird syntax I've worked on in the past so this is definitely possible. Currently only the textual representation and structural editor are in the repo. The most different I have done is a layout where the AST was presented like a file tree. apply ├── int_negate └── 5

I think you created a potential platform for experiments with different language syntax ideas. It is rarely that people want to change how integers are represented and such, mostly it is syntax. So this lets me and others try things out.

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#66

Post by EvanAnderson »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #57
EvanAnderson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside: I support a court who uses a FilePro-based application that dates back, at least, to the mid-90s. I don't have to deal with the actual app-- just the underlying Linux boxes that run it. It seems reasonable.

In the filepro circles there is a famouse bit of history about a large user that once tried to migrate off of it, because obviously it's crap because it's ancient... and paid some shop to rewrite their existing filepro app in some current db framework, I think an oracle product but I don't remember, and they consumed some large amount of money and years, and in the end failed. The client sued the consultants and it a…

BTW, when you say "former colleague" are you referring to _the_ (non-fictional character) Howard Wolowitz?

I don't much care for the show the namesake character was featured in, but between knowing the name from the lore of the TV show and being adjacent filePro I think it's pretty cool to actually talk to somebody who knew him.

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#67

Post by pmontra »

saghm wrote: post #63
pmontra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About your question > how many variables can you really remember at once? and our brain being a bad runtime for programming: I started programming on a Sinclair ZX81 with 1 kB of RAM. I wrote my program on paper, reasoned about it by tracing variables on paper and eventually I typed in the program on the keyboard and run it. That was much better than typing line numbers and BASIC commands directly into the REPL. Of c…

I'd argue that using a pencil and paper (which is a totally reasonable thing!) is not really your memory at that point. Augmenting our hardware with peripherals is a useful technique, but it doesn't fundamentally change the constraints; like in "regular" hardware, you're now paying even more per cycle with the equivalent to looking up on an external disk.

Exactly: even with such small programs I had to note down values and I made mistakes at tracking them.

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#68

Post by kbelder »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #23
viceconsole wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your three examples historically were successful in achieving widespread usage, and in the case of SQL, shows no sign of disappearing.

They are widespread, but not among "normies", but professional programmers. That's what I call a failure, since they were initially designed to be used by non-programmers.

I'd say BASIC might have been common among non-developers, if it hadn't been deliberately killed (or at least severely mis-handled).

Re: EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

#69

Post by Brian_K_White »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #66
Brian_K_White wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the filepro circles there is a famouse bit of history about a large user that once tried to migrate off of it, because obviously it's crap because it's ancient... and paid some shop to rewrite their existing filepro app in some current db framework, I think an oracle product but I don't remember, and they consumed some large amount of money and years, and in the end failed. The client sued the consultants and it a…

BTW, when you say "former colleague" are you referring to _the_ (non-fictional character) Howard Wolowitz? I don't much care for the show the namesake character was featured in, but between knowing the name from the lore of the TV show and being adjacent filePro I think it's pretty cool to actually talk to somebody who knew him.

Yes but I didn't want to be like that, though of course the set of possible matches is so small that's silly but still... We worked at the same company writing software in filepro (well me doing all the sysadmin for the company as well as some fp dev) for about 20 years.

I remember when he went on that trip. It's season 6 ep 4, The Re-Entry Minimization, the last few seconds. Both Howie's are in a diner.

He is absolutely a character. I haven't talked to him in a few years because I left that company and we don't live near each other, and I am just a shitty friend that desn't call people, but I really love that man.

At the 1st or 2nd xmas dinner when the company was small and we did such things, I had an HP Jornada pda that ran WinCE and I had managed to get a dos emulator running on it, with the dos version of fp in that, and I showed it to him, and he immediately closed that and went looking for porn on the device. (one of the main features of the device was simply the large color screen in the time of palm-v)

He is the reason I finally learned to outgrow the very plain rural american diet I was raised on. He brought me to an Indian place he liked and suggested I try the falafel. I had only recently moved to NJ but had not yet appreciated the stupendous variety we enjoy in this area. All that weird stuff was just weird stuff. Becoming adventurous with food is a non-trivial change to you whole life. That one little thing is like a huge thing I can thank him for. Oh and he got me that job in the first place which ended up being rather big life change!

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