Beads: Computer language and toolchain
161–170 of 235 posts
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#162I would seriously consider toning down the marketing speak. This project is making very bold claims, without citations, while trying to appeal to an often skeptical crowd (developers). "Graph databases are considered more powerful and modern than relational databases," ... okay? According to what benchmark and for what workloads? A statement like that is an immediate turnoff because it is dismissive of 30 years of da…
> are considered more powerful and modern
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#163https://beadslang.org/blog/2021/3/23/rip-segmentation
This is.... gibberish. What's going on here? Are we being trolled?
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Graph databases are considered more powerful and modern than relational databases" vs. "Graph databases are quite hot" These two statements are in no way equivalent. I see what GP was complaining about. Even your opening para graph contains a fair bit of confusion. It reads like you are suggesting imperative languages were succeeded by object oriented, which were succeeded by functional in 'generations' - which is a…
okay i have rewritten parts of it. I hope you folks take it for a spin; it has a lot of nice touches in it; worked very hard on the balance between concision and readability.
I was amused to see you trash-talking COBOL on your blog, because the language snippets I've seen read a bit like COBOL.
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> declarative languages have almost no bugs That one piqued my attention. It's one thing to say "fewer bugs" and quite another to say "almost none". Rust is a declarative language with one of the more rigorous static analysis checkers (for pedants: among mainstream languages) and I still write buggy code.
In what way is Rust declarative? When I think of a declarative language, I think of Prolog or SQL. Rust to me would seem to be explicitly imperative.
I guess I was confusing expression based or functional with declarative.
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> declarative languages have almost no bugs" Is this even a declaritave language? Doesn't look like it to me at a glance.
The layout system is declarative (with escape hatch to looping and conditionals), and so is the finite state machine syntax DSL inside, and the regular expression syntax (a novel reformulation). But the nicest feature, invisible in the syntax because it is a property of the runtime under the hood, is that when you change your mutable state, any layout that used those variables is automatically scheduled for refresh.…
MobX does this for JS, in a more generalized way that can be paired with any DOM-update strategy (or other arbitrary side-effects)
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#167I would seriously consider toning down the marketing speak. This project is making very bold claims, without citations, while trying to appeal to an often skeptical crowd (developers). "Graph databases are considered more powerful and modern than relational databases," ... okay? According to what benchmark and for what workloads? A statement like that is an immediate turnoff because it is dismissive of 30 years of da…
Honestly, i think graph db being more powerful is one of their more reasonable claims. Graph db trade off a more flexible data model (which some people would call power) against performance/scalability.
Whether or not that's a good trade off in your domain is a very different question.
Edit: although based on the docs, the graph db seems roughly a data structure where nodes can point to each other (i dont see anything about complex queries, or managing concurrency, or even persistence). By that definition, i think even c would be a language with an embedded graph db (structs and pointers)
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The layout system is declarative (with escape hatch to looping and conditionals), and so is the finite state machine syntax DSL inside, and the regular expression syntax (a novel reformulation). But the nicest feature, invisible in the syntax because it is a property of the runtime under the hood, is that when you change your mutable state, any layout that used those variables is automatically scheduled for refresh.…
MobX does this for JS, in a more generalized way that can be paired with any DOM-update strategy (or other arbitrary side-effects)
"Reactivity" is a common paradigm in the javascript world. There are many libraries to essentially do this or variations on this theme.
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Matter of perspective I admit but it also could just be a weird pastiche of elements of C, COBOL, M, Ada, and JavaScript. Nothing here seems particularly ambitious really.. idiosyncratic however. A good counterpoint might be Go. The author used to at least actively solicit feedback, I never once noticed acknowledgement of any of it though.
We have a Discord group, and am very eager to hear from users. https://discord.gg/pTAdsSW User suggestions and bug reports are promptly followed up on. There are almost no known errors at this point, so it is very good shape. You are correct that it has elements of JavaScript, but that is inevitable given that the primary output of the transpiler is JS code for use on the web, so some JS functions have to be present…
> but that is inevitable given that the primary output of the transpiler is JS code for use on the web, so some JS functions have to be present for that to work, and to inter-operate with JS, one has to use their string system.
I don't see why this is true (i also don't see it as a bad thing. Take what works and all that).
Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since I saw the "replace the entire stack" image, I expect no less than that the website should be made in Beads, hosted on a server running Beads OS, and the frontend should be WebAssembly compiled from Beads.
Beads was going to be recoded in Web Assembly, however, the many restrictions on I/O to the user's hard drive inside the browser make it very to build a compiler inside a browser. Hopefully in the near future Web Assembly will become a fully capable virtual machine, that will unify all the different hardware and operating systems, effectively becoming a universal virtual OS. But any day now the dam will break, and We…
Web assembly is not a hypervisor and doesn't intend to be one.