Tldr for erlang users?
Erlang actors are not privately addressable, so they cannot be used for capability security. The actors described here are.
Misty: A secure distributed actor language
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#12An interesting project, but it seems to be in its infancy :)
I definitely want an actor based language to play with, and something with a strong type system would be perfect. gleam [1] and inko [2] look promising in this regard
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#13Curious if this overlaps at all with the use cases of the spritely project [1]. Another question is whether esoteric languages are strictly needed for these architectures or simply more convenient. [1] https://spritely.institute/
Douglas Crockford has described Misty as vaporware (hence the name), whereas at Spritely we are building and shipping things that can be used. Rather than build an entirely standalone domain specific language, our research and development builds on top of Scheme because it's a multi-paradigm language that is easy to extend to implement new paradigms (such as the actor model) thanks to the powerful macro system. Lexical scope and first-class functions make Scheme amendable to the actor model (Scheme was initially created as an exploration of the actor model) and capability security. For the latter, we are inspired by Jonathan Rees' W7: A security kernel based on the lambda calculus.
http://mumble.net/~jar/pubs/secureos/secureos.html
We are also involved in a cross-organization effort to bring capabilities to everyone (on the network, at least) called OCapN and we are seeking implementers for as many programming languages as possible.
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#14Regardless of the merits of the language itself, the presentation here leaves something to be desired. The landing page itself conveys zero information, and when I click into the Introduction, it's almost entirely dedicated to a particularly persnickety whitespace standard, and the grammar rules for parsing comments and identifiers. This is not really helping me understand what the language is about... Between that a…
...author is Douglas Crockford, creator of JavaScript and JSON.
Brendan Eich (of more recent Brave fame) is the creator of JavaScript.
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#15An interesting project, but it seems to be in its infancy :) I definitely want an actor based language to play with, and something with a strong type system would be perfect. gleam [1] and inko [2] look promising in this regard [1] https://gleam.run/ [2] https://inko-lang.org/
For the record, Elixir has been slowly introducing a set theoretic gradual type system.
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#16Regardless of the merits of the language itself, the presentation here leaves something to be desired. The landing page itself conveys zero information, and when I click into the Introduction, it's almost entirely dedicated to a particularly persnickety whitespace standard, and the grammar rules for parsing comments and identifiers. This is not really helping me understand what the language is about... Between that a…
> I have the sense that the author is more interested in grinding axes than in explaining.
People are free to target whoever they want when publishing on the internet.
There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target.
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#17> The Misty Programming Language is a dynamic, (...), secure, distributed actor language
In this day-and-age, dynamic programs should be considered insecure (in the broad sense) by design. There have been lots of efforts in the past ~15 years to make distributed systems more robust (e.g. Cloud Haskell [0], choreographic programming [1]).
The term "secure" as used here is quite specific, used in reference to a capability model. This is quite nice and innovative. However, static typing and capabilities need not be mutually exclusive: capabilities can be modeled at the type level using algebraic effects [2].
[0]: https://simon.peytonjones.org/haskell-cloud/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choreographic_programming
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#18Regardless of the merits of the language itself, the presentation here leaves something to be desired. The landing page itself conveys zero information, and when I click into the Introduction, it's almost entirely dedicated to a particularly persnickety whitespace standard, and the grammar rules for parsing comments and identifiers. This is not really helping me understand what the language is about... Between that a…
> I have the sense that the author is more interested in grinding axes than in explaining. People are free to target whoever they want when publishing on the internet. There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target.
> People are free to target whoever they want when publishing on the internet.
People are also free to criticize whatever is published on the internet. Hypotetically not being a part of the "target audience" doesn't preclude one form such freedom.
I agree with the comment above: the introduction doesn't really "introduce" the reader to the language, it only introduces the reader to the syntactic constructs used in the language. Such introduction would better fit in the "specification" section.
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#19> The Misty Programming Language is a dynamic, (...), secure, distributed actor language In this day-and-age, dynamic programs should be considered insecure (in the broad sense) by design. There have been lots of efforts in the past ~15 years to make distributed systems more robust (e.g. Cloud Haskell [0], choreographic programming [1]). The term "secure" as used here is quite specific, used in reference to a capabil…
You can also model capabilities with the Object Capability Model—just pass the capabilities around as object handles. This has the downside of being rather verbose, but that can be remedied by something like Scala's implicits.
Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language
#20Regardless of the merits of the language itself, the presentation here leaves something to be desired. The landing page itself conveys zero information, and when I click into the Introduction, it's almost entirely dedicated to a particularly persnickety whitespace standard, and the grammar rules for parsing comments and identifiers. This is not really helping me understand what the language is about... Between that a…
agreed the focus on whitespace rules and grammar feels misaligned for an introduction