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Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

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31–40 of 118 posts

Re: Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

#32

First of all, the syntax is very generic and conservative. I’m extremely positive about that. It just looks like C or Typescript or Java to me and I don’t see mysterious diacritical marks. The next thing is, I need more examples. Read me documents can scroll forever and that’s fine. Add examples for every concept your language wants to cover to it. This is your chance to think things through and make the read me and…

also , yes i have an example i reprogrammed donut.c in my programming language and called it donut.wyz https://github.com/rudywasfound/donut.wyz go check it out!

I would like to see an examples directory with a diverse set of example programs. What would be most interesting to me is programs with non-trivial memory usage and data structures, because that's where differences in the memory model would matter. I want to know what's possible and what's not allowed in this language. What makes this different and better than Rust's borrow checker.

Re: Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

#36
I love the ambition and the fact that this is not just another "state of the art in 2015" language like I see so often. It's trying to do something genuinely different. The field of "taking stuff out of academia and making it work" is a rich and underharvested one.

However, your light is hidden under a basket, to use an old metaphor. I'm having to go digging to find the genuinely new things going on. I suggest recalibrating the entire documentation with a focus on the new stuff. People on HN often complain about not having syntax examples front and center but I would say for you, the very first thing I you should be hitting your new visitors with is the choreography idea.

Set up a simple example of doing something like a concurrent remote counter that is atomically safe by the construction of your language and immediately dive in to what that means. Forget even educating us on the rest of the mundane syntax of the language, immediately dive in to what that is and what that means. I see in the docs/ dir that it probably hurts your programmer mind to cover the choreography before covering sections 1-8, but you can safely assume that if you intrigue with the choreography that they'll hang around to learn about the rest, whereas you can't safely assume that a new reader will wade through all the rest of the relatively mundane details to get to the really interesting stuff.

A modern language with a modern take on compiling a "program" that takes a unified view of the world at the programming language level, and then emits a "server" and a "client" (and perhaps other roles) as separate executables is a pretty nifty idea. Hit it early and hit it hard.

Re: Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

#37
> Go, Java, C#, and Python use garbage collectors. This makes them easier to use but slower and less predictable.

It does not. The term "garbage collectors" covers a whole spectrum of algorithms, some might slow you down (though not for the reason you may think) while others were invented to speed up memory management beyond that of C++, in exchange for other tradeoffs. Python's (mostly) refcounting GC is actually closer to C in its memory management overhead than to either Go or Java. It's also not what makes Python slow. Go uses a mark-and-sweep collector to find a balanace between speed, FFI, and footprint. Java uses moving collectors, which are faster - and some of which are even more predictable - than memory management in C++. That's because Java aims to offer better performance than C++ in large concurrent software, where low-level languages tend to suffer from various overheads due to their requirement for low-level control (Java trades off some performance in smaller programs, but mostly it trades of startup time and footprint). Moving collectors (but not refcoting collectors or mark-and-sweep collectors) are an optimisation over free-list approaches, not a compromise for convenience.

So it is true that slow programming languages tend to use some kind of GC, but that's not what makes them slow, nor does it make the super-fast languages that also use a GC (often of a very different kind) any slower. The range of languages that use GCs covers everything from the super slow to the super fast.

Re: Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

#38
> Wyzer supports standard if/else, while, and for loops. Note that loops don't need parentheses around the condition.

But why!? You know what'd be cool? If we started supporting control statements that were a bit more sophisticated!

``` do { } while (c) { if (x) break foo; } else { case foo : ...; default : ...; } ```

Re: Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

#39
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i poked around in there, under choreographic programming there’s one example of something not in the language as a discarded idea. if you claim X and Y make us cool and different, then you should document X and Y in your readme. don’t tell me something is the star, and then hide it away. this is baffling to me.

its speaking of discarded syntax for choreo, not that the feature was discarded

Still there's not a single example.

Re: Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

#40
> see a new programing language > look inside > it's rust

asking out of my own ignorance, what's so hard with rust that you cannot convince people and contribute to that directly instead of going on your way? i remember so few of these projects survived over the years. do you think it'll really become something other than your pet project?

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