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Dada, an experimental new programming language

dada-lang.org

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Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#141

Post by jacobr1 »

couchand wrote: post #124
ericyd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that creating a new programming language from scratch is a trivial exercise? If yes, wow. If no, I think the intention of your comment could be more clear, particularly regarding the quote you took from the original comment.

I suspect the GP was merely suggesting a less-costly alternative. Perhaps building a complete standalone compiler or interpreter is hard, but we're all designing APIs in our programming languange of choice day in and day out. Both strategies are very hard, but one of then is "build a prototype in a weekend" hard and one of them is "build a prototype is a month" hard.

It is interesting to consider how much the lower abstraction influences the higher abstraction. If you are building on a existing language/runtime/framework then you can inherit more functionality and move faster, but also you implicitly will inherent many of the design decisions and tradeoffs.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#142

Post by bmitc »

sanderjd wrote: post #100
overstay8930 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have awoken the ocaml gang

Yeah, ocaml is awesome! Frankly, if it had a more familiar syntax but the same semantics, I think its popularity would have exploded in the last 15 years. It's silly, but syntax is the first thing people see, and it is only human to form judgments during those moments of first contact.

F# has better syntax but is ignored. :(

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#143

Post by couchand »

jacobr1 wrote: post #137
couchand wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be so quick to discount DSLs. Sure, you don't want a half-baked DSL when some simple imperative code would do. But if you watch your API evolve into an algebra and then don't formalize it with a DSL you might be leaving powerful tools for understanding on the table. A poor-fitting language is terrible for abstract thinking, on the other hand an internally-consistent and domain appropriate language can unlock ne…

A related notion is that you need strong, well-thought out, and when the system is changing, regularly refactored abstractions. You might not need a DSL but your class/type/trait designs needs to be sane, your API needs to be solid, etc ... DDD principles are key here.

Yes, eat your vegetables!

A question of philosophy: If you have all that, don't you already have a DSL, using a deep embedding in the host language?

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#144

Post by sanderjd »

n2d4 wrote: post #127
sanderjd wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it immediately makes me wonder what `await` is... Is it a reference to a field of whatever the `print()` method is returning? Is it calling a method? If it's a method call without parentheses, how do I get a reference to a method without calling it? (These kinds of questions are just unavoidable though; everyone will have these little pet things that they subjectively prefer or dislike.)

They borrowed it from Rust: `.await` is special syntax, roughly equivalent to `await print(...)` in other languages. https://rust-lang.github.io/async-book/01_getting_started/04...

Yeah but for a new language I haven't seen before, I immediately wonder!

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#145

Post by jlouis »

yamrzou wrote: post #6

Their Hello, Dada! example: print("...").await I'm coming from Python, and I can't help but ask: If my goal as a programmer is to simply print to the console, why should I care about the await? This already starts with a non zero complexity and some cognitive load, like the `public static void main` from Java.

It is a fundamental question in your language design. Some languages make side-effects explicit one way or the other. Other languages handles side-effects in a more implicit fashion. There's a tradeoff to be made here.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#146

Post by jacobr1 »

benrutter wrote: post #97
pas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runtime would be nice, but ... that's basically what Tokio and the other async frameworks are. What's needed is better/more runtime(s), better support for eliding stuff based on the runtime, etc. It seems very hard to pick a good 'number' (JS's is actually a double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 float, which almost never feels right).

Yes, that's true - "number" is probably more broad than I'd really want. That said, python's "int", "float" and "decimal" options (although decimal isn't really first class in the same way the otherse are) feels like a nice balance. But again, its interesting the way even that is probably a bias towards the type of problems I work with vs other people who want more specification.

The key though is probably to have a strong Number interface, where the overhead of it being an object is complied away, so you can easily switch out different implementations, optimize to a more concrete time at AOT/JIT time and have clear semantics for conversion when different parts of the system want different concrete numeric types. You can then have any sort of default you want, such as an arbitrary precision library, or decimal or whatever, but easily change the declaration and get all the benefits, without needing to modify downstream code that respects the interface and doesn't rely on a more specific type (which would be enforced by the type system and thus not silent if incompatible).

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#147

Post by couchand »

jacobr1 wrote: post #141
couchand wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the GP was merely suggesting a less-costly alternative. Perhaps building a complete standalone compiler or interpreter is hard, but we're all designing APIs in our programming languange of choice day in and day out. Both strategies are very hard, but one of then is "build a prototype in a weekend" hard and one of them is "build a prototype is a month" hard.

It is interesting to consider how much the lower abstraction influences the higher abstraction. If you are building on a existing language/runtime/framework then you can inherit more functionality and move faster, but also you implicitly will inherent many of the design decisions and tradeoffs.

Very good point. See, for instance Kiselyov's embedding of his tagless final form: https://www.okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/lecture.pdf

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#148

Post by everybodyknows »

sorenjan wrote: post #138

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do. > Updated to use modern pronouns. https://dada-lang.org/docs/about/

On iPad, I see a back-link from the footnote, but no forward link to it from the corrupted quotation.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#149

Post by arethuza »

ericyd wrote: post #92
thesz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually creating a working language is a big overhead Languages, with first class values, pattern matching, rich types, type inference and even fancy RTS, often can be embedded in Haskell. For one example, it is very much possible to embed into Haskell a Rust-like language, even with borrow checking (which is type-checking time environment handling, much like linear logic). See [1], [2] and [3]. [1] http://blog.si…

Are you suggesting that creating a new programming language from scratch is a trivial exercise? If yes, wow. If no, I think the intention of your comment could be more clear, particularly regarding the quote you took from the original comment.

Creating a "new" programming language isn't that difficult - creating something that is interesting, elegant and/or powerful requires a lot of thought and that is difficult.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#150

Post by nialv7 »

color_me_not wrote: post #113

I don't understand the comment in the method print_point in the class Point of the tutorial. [...] # This function is declared as `async` because it # awaits the result of print. async fn print_point(p) { # [...] print("The point is: {p}").await } [...] From the first page of the tutorial: > Dada, like JavaScript, is based exclusively on async-await. This means that operations that perform I/O, like print, don't exec…

I think they didn't do a very good job explaining it. Await doesn't just mean "please run this thunk", it means "I am not going to deal with this thunk, can someone come and take over, just give me the result in the end".

What this means, concretely, in Rust, is `.await` will return the thunk to the caller, and the caller should resume the async function when the result is ready. Of course the caller can await again and push the responsibility further back.

The most important thing here, is that `.await` yields the control of execution. Why does this matter? Because IO can block. If control wasn't given up, IO will block the whole program; if it is, then something else will have a chance to run while you wait.

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