Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

#11

Post by jcburnham »

phtrivier wrote: post #9

I'll be the one to tell it : it's a bit weird for the README of a programming language to have an esoteric quote, pages of prose, links to five research papers / theory books, a flame war on build system, a political manifesto and grand visions about the future of programming, but not a single line of, ahem, the programming language in question ? (I hope I'm not missing sarcasm.) Or is it to weed out the people who d…

Sure, thanks for the feedback. Our standard library is here: https://github.com/yatima-inc/introit, I'll edit the README to make that more prominent

As far as docs and tutorials, we weren't planning on doing a public release for another month or two, so there isn't anything yet. The language is still pre-alpha, so our focus has been on getting the core working correctly before smoothing the on-ramp.

Also, tbh, I'm not 100% settled on what the user-facing syntax should be. Right now we have a simple lisp-like core syntax, but I'm thinking about implementing something like Racket's #lang declaration to allow the user to define and import frontends to that core syntax.

Re: Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

#12

Post by [deleted] »

jcburnham wrote: post #7
throwaway894345 wrote: post #2

> First-class types. This lets you the programmer to tell the compiler what you intend to do in your program. Then, like a helpful robot assistant, the compiler will check to make sure that what you're actually doing matches those expressed intentions. So static typing? Or am I missing something?

Hi, Yatima co-author here, this paragraph refers broadly to static dependent types, like in Idris, but I described them as "first-class-types" here because I thought it sounded more accessible. Also, becase at the type-level Yatima types are ordinary values, so there's an analogy that can be drawn with first-class functions. But it seems from this thread this caused confusion, so I'll update the README shortly to cla…

[deleted]

Re: Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

#16

Post by debarshri »

I think this is a really cool idea. I think you are guys are upto something. I think you need more example, probably an online editor or tutorial. May be there is some, I couldn't find it easily.

It still feels very experimental is nature and has feel of a side project. Not sure if you guys are pursuing it seriously. If yes, I would recommend you to create more education material. I think it is very radical idea that has a huge learning curve. Also, I would recommending moving the motivation and manifesto to your landing page if any and focus on getting started, setting up your dev environment and how you could run your first application.

Cheers!

Re: Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

#17

Post by skulk »

jcburnham wrote: post #8
chubot wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah to me that description sounds like "static type checking". "First-class types" on the other hand means that types are expressions that can be manipulated at runtime, or by compile-time metaprogramming stage. I think Julia is very much like this: types are very complex expressions and they're expressed with the same machinery as arithmetic expressions (femtolisp).

> types are very complex expressions and they're expressed with the same machinery as arithmetic expressions (femtolisp). This is how it works in Yatima. Since we use self-types and lambda-encodings for our datatypes, all type expressions are built up via some combination of self types, pi types and a few type-level constants (like primitives). For example, the type of booleans can be expressed as: def Bool : Type =…

What is 'Type'? Is it a Type as well? In a toy dependent type system I'm building I just declared the top type as an instance of itself without caring about soundness. I'm curious what the approach is here.

Re: Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

#18

Post by asimjalis »

jcburnham wrote: post #11
phtrivier wrote: post #9

I'll be the one to tell it : it's a bit weird for the README of a programming language to have an esoteric quote, pages of prose, links to five research papers / theory books, a flame war on build system, a political manifesto and grand visions about the future of programming, but not a single line of, ahem, the programming language in question ? (I hope I'm not missing sarcasm.) Or is it to weed out the people who d…

Sure, thanks for the feedback. Our standard library is here: https://github.com/yatima-inc/introit , I'll edit the README to make that more prominent As far as docs and tutorials, we weren't planning on doing a public release for another month or two, so there isn't anything yet. The language is still pre-alpha, so our focus has been on getting the core working correctly before smoothing the on-ramp. Also, tbh, I'm n…

The link is helpful. But just to get a feel for the language it would be nice to have a simple “Hello world” example in the main yatima README.

Re: Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

#19

Post by jcburnham »

asimjalis wrote: post #18
jcburnham wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, thanks for the feedback. Our standard library is here: https://github.com/yatima-inc/introit , I'll edit the README to make that more prominent As far as docs and tutorials, we weren't planning on doing a public release for another month or two, so there isn't anything yet. The language is still pre-alpha, so our focus has been on getting the core working correctly before smoothing the on-ramp. Also, tbh, I'm n…

The link is helpful. But just to get a feel for the language it would be nice to have a simple “Hello world” example in the main yatima README.

That makes sense, I'll definitely add a snippet like that to the README once our IO system is finished so you can do a proper side-effecting print of "Hello World" rather than just returning the pure string.
Post reply on HN