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Ballerina, a language with structural type system

v1-0.ballerina.io

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Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#101

Post by vinceguidry »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #93
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #88

As a co-creator of a language (Julia) with a name that is feminine in most of the world, let me give some friendly advice regarding the name "Ballerina", which means "a female ballet dancer". The way you talk about Ballerina comes off rather tone deaf to gender issues. In the post linked here and elsewhere on the language website, the female ballerina—and she is definitely a she—is talked about as an object of grace…

Honestly, this reads like the comment of someone who, themself, can't handle feminine/maternal naming nor material. For example, a motherly massage to a gender-amorphous cartoon in a chair is your hot-button? In an alternate dimension, this post is written about a language released in 2019 named "Python", an obvious phallic symbol. How are women supposed to take a programming language seriously that reminds them of a…

It reads to me like someone whose had to deal with a lot of this:

> —we didn't originally think we'd need to say that, but it turns out people just cannot resist saying creepy, sexual shit about anything they perceive to be feminine.

Personally speaking, I knew exactly what 90% of the comments were going to be about just from the front page. Seeing that the dev team isn't from the US explained it, but yeah, it has to be hard out there for non-US teams to submit to HN.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#102

Post by rurban »

mpfundstein wrote: post #95
rurban wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Sanjiva, I'm impressed. Of the product, and that you have that many excellent Java coders in Sri Lanka. Didn't expect that. Java really needs a safe structurally typed product. What are the major differences to Scala?

Why didn’t you expect that Sri Lanka has excellent Java coders?

Because I never heard of them. I heard of Bangalore and Gurgaon, but never Colombo.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#103

Post by Fellshard »

minraws wrote: post #70
_8ljf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t even need to read past the product name. Like a lot of geeks they just don’t have a clue how to sell, nor how to hire talent that can. There is no part of their branding that is not a straight disaster. (And that shoulder massage…oy.) Look, real ballerinas are totally hardcore badass atheletes who could easily kick all our flabby nerd asses while standing on one toe, and I take my hat off to them for what t…

Couldn't even get the Examples page to open properly after 10minutes of wait on my phone... =D

On the upside, if it /does/ load, it's one of the stronger layouts for examples, well-annotated to introduce the concepts being explored, and not just slapping you in the face with a bunch of novel code you would struggle to interpret.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#104

Post by cormacrelf »

Firadeoclus wrote: post #90
imtringued wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning how to write code isn't a significant barrier. It's just pressing buttons on a keyboard. Logical thinking and problem solving are far more important. Switching to a visual language doesn't actually help you with that. Worse, if clicking virtual buttons with a mouse is slower than pressing physical buttons you will waste mental capacity that could have been used for problem solving and logical thinking.

Logical thinking and problem solving can greatly benefit from visual representations and feedback. I write code but I often wish the representation was much more visual than lines of dense monospaced text with a little bit of colour. Diagrams are often easier to parse and reason about. When trying to understand difficult code or figuring out a difficult problem before writing code I generally draw diagrams with pen a…

> more of this translation could be automated

It seems to me that when creating a visual programming language for a particular class of programs, you probably find that making this translator is the same hard mental work that would let you make a text-based programming language instead. Once you have a good mapping from thoughts to code, the visual part doesn't add much. I was talking to a non-programmer recently who had tried Scratch and gotten tired of the visual layer very quickly. It's rare to see a visual -> code mapping that retains value after you've used it the first time, i.e. value beyond teaching.

I like the general idea of going the other direction, from code to diagram. I'm not interested in editing the diagram, but it's great for reading the code and sanity checking. But it doesn't have to be the actual code. A great many projects would benefit from having a GraphViz generator instead of hundreds of printlns. I was talking today about adding a GraphViz .dot visualisation to the salsa-rs incremental computation database, because I was reading the documentation on garbage collection and just wanted to see it in action. I know the rustc folks have been doing this for ages.

I think in addition to generating graphviz, it would be cool to have a log viewer that can render it.

    $ my-program
    normal logs
    viz:"digraph {\n0 -> 1..."
    more normal logs
    ^C

    $ my-program | logviz
    normal logs
    more normal logs
... and a window pops up that animates changes between each graph that appears in the logs. Or even better, a tool that takes regular printlns of edges, nodes, etc, interprets them as an append-only variant (with deletion, etc) of graphviz, and assembles them into a graphical representation that changes on the fly. So you don't need to have a graph implementation in every language you want to do it with.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#105

Post by reilly3000 »

I played with Ballerina about 6 months ago. I wasn't able to sell it to my team, but I was extremely impressed. Type safety, brilliant Kubernetes deployment, and a very rich API for integration tasks made it appealing for 'glue code'.

If you're considering spending 5 mins to write a comment on why we don't need this language, please consider spending that time with their examples page instead. Its pretty impressive in breadth and depth.

I do think that the whole diagram bit is noise, and I could never really get it to work as expected in VScode. Its just a solid language for service development.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#106

Post by jmull »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #93
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #88

As a co-creator of a language (Julia) with a name that is feminine in most of the world, let me give some friendly advice regarding the name "Ballerina", which means "a female ballet dancer". The way you talk about Ballerina comes off rather tone deaf to gender issues. In the post linked here and elsewhere on the language website, the female ballerina—and she is definitely a she—is talked about as an object of grace…

Honestly, this reads like the comment of someone who, themself, can't handle feminine/maternal naming nor material. For example, a motherly massage to a gender-amorphous cartoon in a chair is your hot-button? In an alternate dimension, this post is written about a language released in 2019 named "Python", an obvious phallic symbol. How are women supposed to take a programming language seriously that reminds them of a…

The previous poster is giving good advice.

I can tell you don't see it, but there are a multiple aspects of the ballerina site that will offend many of the people they presumably want to engage. I assume that's unintentional. The best thing for them to do is to understand the problems, fix them, and apologize to the offended people.

Dismissing the words of the person explaining the problems and providing good advice on dealing with them is a good way to remain frustrated and fail.

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#107

Post by dragonwriter »

_8ljf wrote: post #49
yoz wrote: post #8

Excerpted quote from their launch blog post ( https://blog.ballerina.io/posts/annoucing-1.0.0/ ): > That obviously starts with the Enterprise Integrator team as that is where this baby was flirted with, dated and then conceived; This is what happens when people think that coding is hard but writing is easy. WSO2: Please, on behalf of innocent eyeball-owners everywhere, hire a dedicated content editor.

You don’t even need to read past the product name. Like a lot of geeks they just don’t have a clue how to sell, nor how to hire talent that can. There is no part of their branding that is not a straight disaster. (And that shoulder massage…oy.) Look, real ballerinas are totally hardcore badass atheletes who could easily kick all our flabby nerd asses while standing on one toe, and I take my hat off to them for what t…

> Look, real ballerinas are totally hardcore badass atheletes

Yes.

> who could easily kick all our flabby nerd asses while standing on one toe

For the most part, no, though if both parties have to try to stand one toe during the exercise, maybe.

> But how many professional software developers will really want to self-identify as “ballerinas” when discussing between themselves, never mind pitching to board rooms?

Uh, I don't usually identify, or want to identify, as name of tool when doing any of those things, whether the tool is Python, Ruby, C#, Docker, etc. Why would my lack of desire to do so when the tool is Ballerina be differentiating?

Identifying as user-of-toolname is different than identifying as toolname (and I actually prefer to minimize the former, too: when I'm dancing—contemporary or, less often these days, ballroom/swing, not classical ballet—I don't identify as a user of a particular brand of shoe, either.)

Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#109

Post by dang »

megla_ wrote: post #59
kybernetikos wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an entirely neutral culture it'd be fine. In a culture that says that women aren't programmers, it perpetuates a common narrative that women are for display and support but not for real work. It's not helped by the picture above it where the ballerina is pictured with batteries. Taken all together it seems to suggest that women are objects and that this is a product for men. Yes, we're all being hyper sensitive ab…

I'm sure hundreds of women won't go into STEM, now that this one new language has a picture of a ballerina with batteries giving a massage to some dude with a laptop. Maybe they should illustrate her putting batteries in a vibrator, so she can go fuck herself, just like you should.

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Re: Ballerina, a language with structural type system

#110

Post by UncleMeat »

rmilejczz wrote: post #68
skybrian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the front page ends with a picture of someone massaging a programmer's shoulders.

It’s a visual metaphor, the ballerina represents the language and they are supporting / comforting the programmer. I’d say its pretty corny, especially when a bunch of literal engineers need it explained to them, but it’s not just a random picture of a back rub

Intention and interpretation are different. People who have already had rough gender experiences in software might read this image differently than you.
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