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The Borgo Programming Language

borgo-lang.github.io

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Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#131

Post by riwsky »

nine_k wrote: post #84
renox wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right nobody will use it: it's a one man language are you going to bet your codebase on it? It probably doesn't have any tooling, debugggers.. Are the error messages from the compiler good?

Elm is also a one-man language, but it enjoyed some popularity. Zig has been a one-man language for some time, but it's got traction, following, and more contributors. Syntax squiggles are not very important, but other language features, like a good design and removing whole classes of bugs, are.

That it enjoyed some popularity doesn’t mean it was the right choice. Teams who adopted it were, in all likelihood, betting that it would see wider adoption—and if they’d known how Elm (vs, say, TypeScript) ended up by 2024, they probably wouldn’t have gone down that path in the first place.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#132

Post by lmm »

nine_k wrote: post #81
Philpax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the impediment to adoption is the syntax - that's straightforward enough - it's the ecosystem / tooling / network effects. I love this, even though I don't interact with Go on a regular basis, but I recognise that I'd be locking myself out of a lot of the standard Go tooling if I adopted this wholesale. For better or for worse, there's a high ecosystem barrier that most languages must overcome to be ado…

What standard tooling would fail, given that the translation goes via a a generated Go source? I suppose there must be some borgofmt that handles the particular syntax. Certainly debuggers would have to be updated to show the corresponding Borgo code line at least. What else?

IDEs, profilers, instrumentation agents, code coverage tools... essentially any tooling really.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#133

Post by lmm »

kjksf wrote: post #6

I love it. This is a language that everyone here says they want but no one will use, even though it's stable and mature (I assume because it compiles to stable and mature Go and can use every existing Go library). It hits all the "ok, Go is popular but made by morons for morons and if only it had this X advanced feature, it would be totally great". It has immutability. It has advanced enums. It has algebraic types. I…

> It hits all the "ok, Go is popular but made by morons for morons and if only it had this X advanced feature, it would be totally great".

The people who use Go despite its issues are using it because of the tiling and the massive Google backing. Neither of which this has. Someone who wants a language that implements some of the good ideas of the 1970s and is willing to leave Go for that already has many established options.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#134

Post by nine_k »

desumeku wrote: post #120
pjmlp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java compiles to native code for two decades now, it has always been a matter of how much one was willing to pay for a commercial JDK. “The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them…

"We hire working-class college graduates from the normal population, and not ivy league graduates who have the time to waste on unproductive academic research languages that see no industrial use." Is this what is so damning about Go? The constant reposting of this quote as some sort of attack on Go's validity and reputation reeks of nothing but classism.

Googlers used to think about themselves as of elite engineers, having passed a very stringent and demanding interview process.

Mr. Pike's quotation assumes that the Googlers should not be expected to be too intellectually capable. That's the damning part for me.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#135

Post by nine_k »

onefiveone wrote: post #127
erik_seaberg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is famous for tough interviews and accepting a small fraction of applicants. I was impressed with everyone I met, and Pike's "incapable" statement was baseless and insulting.

> Pike's "incapable" statement was baseless and insulting. "incapable" != "never capable", especially when talking about fresh college graduates.

"Unwilling", "have no time", "can't be bothered" are all better than "incapable".

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#136

Post by nine_k »

samatman wrote: post #111
nine_k wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elm is also a one-man language, but it enjoyed some popularity. Zig has been a one-man language for some time, but it's got traction, following, and more contributors. Syntax squiggles are not very important, but other language features, like a good design and removing whole classes of bugs, are.

Zig is a BDFL language, but it's far from a one-man language. There's a Zig Foundation with several full-time paid contributors, with a larger design team who collaborate on the big picture. If Andrew Kelly were kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, Zig would continue. I think that's the dividing point, when the bus factor is no longer one.

Exactly my point: Zig managed to pass from a one-man-show stage to a more mature, more established stage. Same happened much earlier with PHP and Perl.

Elm, sadly, never achieved that. But I don't see why Borgo would necessarily follow the way of Elm and not of Zig or PHP.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#137

Post by Supermancho »

miohtama wrote: post #73
blixt wrote: post #3

This is quite beautiful. It hides several ugly warts of Go without necessarily adding more complexity. Result instead of (T, error) and ? for propagation is just so nice. Structured enums is something I find myself needing all the time (and writing less self-explanatory code due to the lack of it). Option instead of nil and zero values (which builds upon structured enum support) is what got me to say "yes please!" Ho…

Is this TypeScript of Go?

The graph and syntax, individually, inform the answer succinctly. No.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#138

Post by desumeku »

codr7 wrote: post #129
desumeku wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We hire working-class college graduates from the normal population, and not ivy league graduates who have the time to waste on unproductive academic research languages that see no industrial use." Is this what is so damning about Go? The constant reposting of this quote as some sort of attack on Go's validity and reputation reeks of nothing but classism.

The complaint is that it was designed for lesser brains and lacks many features professionals expect, and that's pretty much an objective truth.

This is a horrifically obtuse and offensive comment just because Go isn't Lisp-y or Haskell-y enough for you. Golang powers large swathes of distributed services and systems all over the world whether you like it or not, because it was designed with a very specific purpose in mind by people far more professional and accomplished than you ever will be.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#139

Post by desumeku »

nine_k wrote: post #134
desumeku wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We hire working-class college graduates from the normal population, and not ivy league graduates who have the time to waste on unproductive academic research languages that see no industrial use." Is this what is so damning about Go? The constant reposting of this quote as some sort of attack on Go's validity and reputation reeks of nothing but classism.

Googlers used to think about themselves as of elite engineers, having passed a very stringent and demanding interview process. Mr. Pike's quotation assumes that the Googlers should not be expected to be too intellectually capable. That's the damning part for me.

Intellectually capable to do what? Orchestrate some of the largest distributed network systems in the world? I bet you all the best functional programmers wouldn't be able to create something as big as Google if you got them in a room together. Nor would they be able to create anything as important as UNIX, like one of Go's creators did. Nor UTF-8. Nor the JVM HotSpot machine. I could go on. What have you done that Ken Thompson couldn't?

The fact that none of these highly accomplished individuals want anything FP-related in Go says far more than what typical Go-haters want to think it does.

Re: The Borgo Programming Language

#140

Post by throwaway17_17 »

cwalv wrote: post #107
scythe wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python was obscure and developed in silence for 15 years before it caught on. The team behind it just never gave up. Most people who develop independent languages give up after a year or five. Lua is similar, though it and PHP both caught on faster because they both put embedding upfront, which allowed them to be built into game engines and websites built with C.

Python also fits its design space amazingly well (that's what's meant by "Guido's time machine"). It's a glue language, with a REPL, but it's not a shell (i.e. it's not meant to glue programs primarily through stdin/stdout/argv, but instead libraries through their APIs). It was a very useful (Greenspun's tenth rule) and somewhat underserved niche (perl, scheme and tcl come to mind).

I know this is a really late reply, but your comment says ‘[i]t was a …’. Was that just an odd choice of tense or are you arguing that Python is no longer useful for its niche? If so, and I’m genuinely asking, is there a replacement for the glue language aspect that retains Pythons wide standard library approach?
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