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A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

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Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#171

Post by josephcooney »

dded wrote: post #152
alco wrote: post #122

YAGPL (yet another general-purpose language). I think we've had enough of those in the past decade. Each one has something new to offer, but at the same time it disperses attention of the programmer crowd and so less effort is put into each language's development. I think we need to experiment more with single-purpose languages. I'm not saying DSLs because those are mostly embedded syntactic constructs in existing la…

Do you have any "particular problem" in mind? You don't mention one. I think the trouble with single-purpose languages is that, realistically, their development needs to be motivated by a real problem not satisfactorily addressed by an existing language. And since the people with these problems are not often going to be language designers, most such opportunities will be missed. I'm frankly surprised by the existence…

Fetching information from a data store of some kind, and presenting it as a web page would be a good one.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#172

Post by dmunoz »

ehudla wrote: post #168
dmunoz wrote: post #23

I'm going to ramble a little below, so I'll get to the point up front: is there even a new language here? I don't mean in the sense that Rust seems to attempt what is being hand waved about in the submission, but that the linked blog post states > I’ve given a few glimpses into this work over the years. In the months to come, I will start sharing more details. My goal is to eventually open source this thing, but... W…

For the record, Charles didn't post it to the home page. I promoted it there, since I thought (correctly, it turns out) that it might be of wide interest. So all the blame for that goes to me.

It's actually nice to see activity on the LtU front page. The two other posts I would assign to the same category as the submitted one would be xkcd: Functional [0] and The Three Laws of Programming Language Design [1] posts. They both had good discussion, which is where a lot of value at LtU comes from. I even wrote my own little script to make the expanded, threaded list of comments collapsible to consume them more to my liking.

To be fair, I was being unjustly negative because of my worry about how Microsoft treats such projects. Admittedly, after sleeping on it, I don't see it to be as big as a deal as I did last night. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft produces, and we'll still have the open and approachable Rust regardless.

I find Charles reply to your comment about the HN thread odd though. He says

> It's interesting, though not unexpected, that folks are already comparing this language to D, Rust, and Go which also aim for a nirvana (safe, productive, fast, open) without really having many of the details required to make intelligent comparisons (on reddit, somebody made a post asserting this language is MS's _answer_ to D and Rust... WTF?).

Why is this interesting or unexpected? Joe Duffy's blog post mentions D and Rust explicitly. That we don't have "many of the details required to make intelligent comparisons" was my issue with it being hand wavy. There are already conspiracy themed posts about this being because Microsoft wants to lock down patents on these parts of the language [2]. Post the details, and we'll likely see "intelligent comparisons" being made on HN and Reddit.

The post is spreading on Reddit as well, if you would like to see others feelings on the matter [3].

[0] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4816

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4754

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1tve0m/a_glimpse_into_...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/duplicates/1tvic1/the_mi...

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#173

Post by chas »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #104
jbeja wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If python is the language that you are gonna use, you would try Kivy cross-platform framework to make GUI for desktop and mobile.

I just tried Kivy. Thanks for telling me about it! Kivy is pretty awesome: very easy to use, and it Just Works on all platforms, even mobile. It's also painless to deploy Kivy apps to users, which is great. It's hardware accelerated, so I can write my own custom GLSL shaders for the UI, which is pretty cool. I bet I could even implement a Mario-style game using Kivy. The main application window is just a GL context,…

I have had similar experiences with Kivy. I previously developed a simple game with PyMT[0] relatively easily, so I was very excited when Kivy came out. I had another project requiring multitouch support on a PC recently and decided to use Kivy and it immediately crashed my window manager every time I tried to run it which turned me off pretty quickly.

I ended up doing the multi-touch UI in JavaScript and HTML instead. It felt much clunkier to work with, but I wasn't comfortable with wrangling Kivy's instability for the rest of the project.

[0] http://cleichner.blogspot.com/2011/02/multitouch-project.htm...

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#174

Post by EdwardDiego »

samirahmed wrote: post #145
sergiotapia wrote: post #103

I just hope it's not so heavily tied to an IDE. One of the things I really enjoy about using Go and Ruby is that I can use whatever the heck I want to write code. C# was my first language learning and it took a while to shake off the notion that "everything must be done with an IDE".

I couldn't agree more. That said, I think hidden in your last sentence is the fact that working with C# in an IDE with a statically typed language is such a pleasure. For most mundane code (loops, linq, if/else), Resharper will literally autocomplete everything. I really wish other languages offered such tooling at times. I don't think any other language/IDE combo comes close (in my opinion).

Try Intellij IDEA with Java and the various Java frameworks - IDEA is Jetbrains' (developers of Resharper) flagship IDE, they also do slightly more focused variants for Python, Ruby, PHP, and web development (PyCharm, RubyMine, PHPStorm, and WebStorm respectively.)

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#175

Post by EdwardDiego »

stusmall wrote: post #129
EdwardDiego wrote: post #91

> it’s not uncommon for us to encounter 30-50% time spent in GC Hmm... not sure if that's just C#, or if I should start profiling my Java apps a lot more closely.

I'd written a JVM project a while ago that also spent an ungodly amount of time in GC. You can create bottlenecks almost anywhere given enough (lack of) effort. Who knows how finely tuned these projects were or what their load was like before a rewrite. A rewrite in a new language gives you more benefits than just the new language , it also gives you the benefit of hindsight. The ability to fix mistakes made in the f…

> Who knows how finely tuned these projects were or what their load was like before a rewrite. A rewrite in a new language gives you more benefits than just the new language , it also gives you the benefit of hindsight. The ability to fix mistakes made in the first implementation can go a long way.

That's a very good point with these rewrite stories - you could happen to rewrite some really poor code while porting and boom! Language Y is 50% more performant!

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#176

Post by asveikau »

moomin wrote: post #160
asveikau wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been on here long enough to remember an HN of old, but I totally agree that on a lot of topics the depth is lacking here. Witness that TFA is all about how GC makes C# kind of suck, and that is the big thing they are trying to fix. Any commenters showing signs of grokking this? Nope, they are mostly talking about C# being awesome. I think a lot of folks here have a hard time thinking about a world without G…

For the record, top rated comment here, and I do a fair bit of C++ as well as C# and am fully aware of how awesome have proper control over allocations would be. My frustration is that once they've finished, I don't believe it would be any more use than C# in practice. (There's a nice language struggling to get out of C++14.) However, Rust exists and is unlikely to be as encumbered as what Microsoft produces.

Perhaps you are right that I am painting HN with too broad a brush. I do see some good points made scatteringly in this discussion, such as yours.

On Rust, and also this project (I believe the following point is mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well): There's one thing I don't get about the whole thing. People who want a low-level language with lots of control have C and C++. People who want a high-level language with GC etc. have lots of options today as well. So, why Rust, and why this MS project? C and C++ have faults but the people who care about them are well aware; if nothing else they are a known quantity. People who don't care about any of this will just pick the higher-level stuff.

I guess I'll have to try one of these languages out to form a better opinion.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#177

Post by ehudla »

dmunoz wrote: post #172
ehudla wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, Charles didn't post it to the home page. I promoted it there, since I thought (correctly, it turns out) that it might be of wide interest. So all the blame for that goes to me.

It's actually nice to see activity on the LtU front page. The two other posts I would assign to the same category as the submitted one would be xkcd: Functional [0] and The Three Laws of Programming Language Design [1] posts. They both had good discussion, which is where a lot of value at LtU comes from. I even wrote my own little script to make the expanded, threaded list of comments collapsible to consume them more…

> It's actually nice to see activity on the LtU front page.

I agree.

But I think it would be more appropriate to conduct LtU meta-discussions over on LtU...

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#178

Post by forgotAgain »

I think they would be better off porting C# to other platforms. Their long term strategy of keeping developers locked up on Windows has become counter productive. Developers want / need to develop on Apple and Android platforms as well as Windows.

Microsoft has great development tools. It would be better for them to hold onto the developers and share them with other platforms rather than losing them completely. By making their development tools multi-platform they would be bringing many developers to Windows who today want little to do with that platform.

Re: A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

#180

Post by kolev »

kolev wrote: post #179

No Linux and Mac, no thank you!

To clarify, Mono is no Stereo: no first-class support of non-Windows platforms pretty much dooms the language. And it's not about where you develop, it's where you deploy. I'm not gonna switch to Azure or AWS/Windows, because of a fancier language when there are D, Go, and others!
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