Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#11

Post by dgb23 » Wed, May 11, 2022, 9:30 AM UTC

Tomis02 wrote: post #8

Confusingly, it doesn't seem to have much to do with data-oriented design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-oriented_design

This gets brought up a lot. Data orientation was a term coined in two different programming communities: game engines and information systems. The terms have overlap and some of the implications are similar. But there are also significant differences as the game programming term focuses on data layout and performance, while the information system term is more about simplicity and leverage. They both are divergences specifically from mainstream OOP.

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#12

Post by snidane » Wed, May 11, 2022, 11:00 AM UTC

It looks as far from a data oriented language as it can be. It's yet another algol, specifically javascript/typescript variation. How does it help with joins, group bys, pivots, explodes, etc? No mention of those, just some javascript like operations.

No mention of data layout or storage, so it's just an in-memory pointer chasing thing. If I load it with a million records is it going to run out of memory?

It mentions null as the billion dollar mistake. The only problem with null is how SQL treats it in joins and rollups, otherwise there is no problem with it. Another sign that the language is targetting the wrong audience.

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#13

Post by viebel » Wed, May 11, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

snidane wrote: post #12

It looks as far from a data oriented language as it can be. It's yet another algol, specifically javascript/typescript variation. How does it help with joins, group bys, pivots, explodes, etc? No mention of those, just some javascript like operations. No mention of data layout or storage, so it's just an in-memory pointer chasing thing. If I load it with a million records is it going to run out of memory? It mentions…

Don't confuse Data-Oriented Design with Data-Oriented Programming[1]

[1] https://blog.klipse.tech/visualization/2021/02/16/data-relat...

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#14

Post by gavinray » Wed, May 11, 2022, 12:56 PM UTC

viebel wrote: post #3

lf-non wrote: post #2

Ballerina is quite interesting and its flexible structural typing seems to make it a great fit for solutions that weave together multiple services. One thing that the article does not highlight is the interop story [1]. It is currently hosted on JVM, but that is supposedly intended to be an implementation detail. So unlike Kotlin explicit ffi bindings are needed. This may create some friction for early adopters, but…

Ballerina team told me that in the future Ballerina will not be hosted on JVM.

It's a bad choice IMO

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#15

Post by Semaphor » Wed, May 11, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

edit: I should have read further. The more interesting parts happen very late in the article. A lot of what is described is still possible (including the querying) in C#, but other things only in very awkward ways.

Original post follows:

It seems this is almost possible in C#. Missing is the required property proposal [0], so currently the choice is between having everything be optional, or using explicit constructors (which loses most of what is wanted here). But that does not seem like a huge difference:

    Member m = new()
    {
        FirstName = "Kelly",
        Books = new()
        {
            new() { Author = "Hohlbein, Wolfgang" },
            new() { Author = "Tchaikovsky, Adrian" }
        }
    };

Definitions:

    public record struct Book
    {
        public string Author { get; set; }
    }
    public record struct Member
    {
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public List Books { get; set; }
    }

[0]: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/3630

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#16

Post by jcelerier » Wed, May 11, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

In C++ I very often find myself wanting to have the ability to define a type inline - e.g. my ideal syntax would look like

    int z = 1;
    auto x = [=] { .foo = z, .bar = {4,5,6}, .baz = "" };

Combined with the ability to introspect things at compile-time available in c++20, I think that this would get 99% there for common data-oriented design designs, without the need for a completely new programming language such as Ballerina.

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#17

Post by iknownothow » Wed, May 11, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

This pales in comparison to Pydantic in terms elegance, flexibility and batteries being included. But pydantic is quite slow.

I discovered pydantic-core [1] which is a backend of sorts for pydantic written in Rust. It is yet to be integrated into pydantic, but once the integration is done, the author expects a potential 10x speed improvement.

[1] https://github.com/samuelcolvin/pydantic-core

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#18

Post by sameerajayasoma » Thu, May 12, 2022, 7:08 AM UTC

_alxk wrote: post #7

viebel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballerina team told me that in the future Ballerina will not be hosted on JVM.

> Ballerina team told me that in the future Ballerina will not be hosted on JVM. They also told me that back at Kubecon in 2018 :D

https://github.com/ballerina-platform/nballerina :) This is an active project.

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#19

Post by gpderetta » Thu, May 12, 2022, 9:48 AM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #16

In C++ I very often find myself wanting to have the ability to define a type inline - e.g. my ideal syntax would look like int z = 1; auto x = [=] { .foo = z, .bar = {4,5,6}, .baz = "" }; Combined with the ability to introspect things at compile-time available in c++20, I think that this would get 99% there for common data-oriented design designs, without the need for a completely new programming language such as Bal…

"Easy" to do if you are willing to put up with macros:

   https://github.com/gpderetta/libtask/blob/master/tests/q_test.cpp#L160

Note the macro is $, tup is just a C++ function. It doesn't handle your .bar case, but would be very easy to extend tup to handle initializer lists.

(No, I do not use it in production, it is mostly a fun curiosity, but yes, I wish lightweight named tuples were part of the language).

Re: Ballerina: A Data-Oriented Programming Language

#20

Post by Tomis02 » Thu, May 12, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

dgb23 wrote: post #11

Tomis02 wrote: post #8

Confusingly, it doesn't seem to have much to do with data-oriented design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-oriented_design

This gets brought up a lot. Data orientation was a term coined in two different programming communities: game engines and information systems. The terms have overlap and some of the implications are similar. But there are also significant differences as the game programming term focuses on data layout and performance, while the information system term is more about simplicity and leverage. They both are divergences s…

The game programming flavour of data-oriented design is often described as an optimisation technique, but I feel this is a misconception. Performance and maintainability are not mutually exclusive.

My understanding based on talks by Mike Acton and others is that DOD is biased against adding unnecessary abstraction, which in turn makes it easy to understand (i.e., maintain) the software. If you can reason about what your program is doing - which bytes are read and which are written, adding things on top might be unnecessary and hurt readability. You don't necessarily need to care about optimising for cache hits or data alignment; if your software needs to 1. read a "name" from the network, 2. make sure it's lowercase and 3. write it to the database, then just do that. There's no need to have a "name" object with constructors, getters and setters; there's no need to split your functionality into 1000 "reusable" little modules. The only time you'd use a class is when it helps prevent resource leak, so you'd use RAII when opening files in C++ to make sure they close when leaving the scope.

It's a long discussion :)