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Dada, an experimental new programming language

dada-lang.org

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Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#171

Post by tialaramex »

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/

I mean, Tristan Tzara is Romanian and so it seems likely that this thought isn't originally English anyway, so it's reasonable for a modern writer to choose to translate it in a more inclusive way. I expect that an early English Bible and a modern one likewise make different choices about whether a text that's clearly about people generally and isn't concerned with sex or gender - should say "He" or "They" / "His" or "Their" and so on.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#172

Post by zarathustreal »

myko wrote: post #168
ursuscamp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an avid fan of Rust, the Rust community is incredibly cringe about this topic.

Seems more cringe to complain about pronouns

I think we’re all saying the same things here. No one wants to hear complaints about pronouns

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#173

Post by cmrdporcupine »

sanderjd wrote: post #151
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned SML/NJ and OCaml a bit over 20 years ago and liked them, but when I tried my hand at Haskell my eyes glossed over. I get its power. But I do not like its syntax, it's hard to read. And yes, the obsession with purity.

Exactly right. I quite like haskell in theory, but in practice I quite dislike both reading and writing it. But I like ocaml both in theory and practice (also in part due to having my eyes opened to SML about 20 years ago).

I actually preferred SML/NJ when I played with writing it, but OCaml "won" in the popularity contest. Some of the things that made OCaml "better" (objects, etc.) haven't aged well, either.

Still with OCaml finally supporting multicore and still getting active interest, I often ponder going back and starting a project in it someday. I really like what I see with MirageOS.

These days I just work in Rust and it's Ok.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#174

Post by jerf »

nu11ptr wrote: post #96

I like the idea, but please no "async/await". In a higher level language green threads like Go has are the correct answer IMO (and I'm not a Go fan, but I feel they got this part right). Gradual typing is interesting, but I wonder if necessary. Static typing doesn't have to feel like a burden and could make it hard to reason about performance. I think more type inference would be better than gradually typed (like OCa…

"Gradual typing is interesting, but I wonder if necessary."

Open question: Are there any languages that can be used in a (decent [1]) REPL, that are strongly typed, but do not have Hindley–Milner-based type inference?

We have multiple concrete proofs that you can have a REPL with Hindley-Milner inference, but I'm curious if this is perhaps a concession to the difficulty of a strongly-typed REPL without a deeply inferable type system. But it's just an idle musing I'm throwing out to see the response to.

[1]: That is, for example, multiple people have put a Go REPL together, but anyone who has used a "real" REPL from the likes of Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, O'Caml, Python, etc., will not find it a "decent" REPL, as Go just can't have one for various reasons.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#175

Post by haswell »

mihaic wrote: post #166

I've written a bit of Rust, and I was left with mixed feelings, that seem to be still the same here: - loved the memory safety patterns when compared to the horrible things that you can do with C++ - found almost every thing where it was different to have a harder to parse syntax, that I could never get used to. The implicit return at the end of a statement for instance make it harder for me to visually parse what's…

I’m in the middle of working through The Rust Book, and I haven’t written any serious code with it yet, so interpret this through that lens.

When I looked at rust code before, it all seemed a bit weird. I couldn’t immediately understand it, but I’ve since come to realize this was because the dozen or so languages I can read well don’t really resemble rust, so my pattern matching was a bit off.

The more I learn about the syntax and core concepts, the more I’m learning that my brain absolutely loves it. Once I started to understand matches, lifetime syntax and the core borrowing mechanics, things clicked and I’m more excited about writing code than I’ve been since I taught myself GW-BASIC 25 years ago.

Just sharing this anecdote because I find it interesting how differently people experience languages. I also have an ongoing friendly debate with a friend who absolutely hates Python, while I rather enjoy it. I’ve tried to understand why he hates it, and he’s tried to understand why I like it. And it all seems to come down to hard-to-define things that just rub us in different ways.

I hope the benefits of rust find their way into more types of languages in the future.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#176

Post by rob74 »

OtomotO wrote: post #162
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/

Non-native-speaker take: I don't care, it just reads a bit "weird" as I learned English before and "theirs" was plural... but I am adaptable. As long as the meaning of the quote isn't changed I couldn't care less and it seems very important to some people. What I personally dislike though is the whole "Ask me my pronouns" thing... like "No, I don't care about your gender or sex, as long as I am not interested in a ro…

The "singular they" has been a thing in English for a long time (since the 14th century according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they). I'm a non-native speaker as well, and wasn't taught about it in school either (maybe that has changed in the meantime?). The first time I consciously noticed it is probably in the Sting song If You Love Somebody Set Them Free (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Love_Somebody_Set_Them_...), which was his debut solo single, so is already quite old itself (1985, although I probably heard it later).

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#177

Post by alphazard »

herval wrote: post #167
alphazard wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also noticed this, along with the warnings that Dada doesn't really exist yet (which is fine, thanks for the heads up). I predict this project will have its priorities backwards. There's a group of people who want to govern a programming language project, and inject their ideology into that structure, and maybe there's another group of avid language designers in there too. I think there are more of the first.

How do you “inject ideology” in a programming language? Compiler error if the variable name is sexist?

> How do you “inject ideology” in a programming language?

I was just talking about the project community and governance. It would be hard to imagine injecting ideology into the language itself.

Oh wait, nevermind...

https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/nightly-rustc/tidy/style/cons...

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#178

Post by mattgreenrocks »

happens wrote: post #25

It's weird, I want pretty much the exact opposite of this: a language with the expressive type system and syntax of rust, but with a garbage collector and a runtime at the cost performance. Basically go, but with rusts type system. I'm aware that there are a few languages that come close to this (crystal iirc), but in the end it's adoption and the ecosystem that keeps me from using them.

Kotlin scratches that itch well for me. My only complaints are exceptions are still very much a thing to watch, and ADT declarations are quite verbose when compared with more pure FP languages.

Still, the language is great. Plus, it has Java interop, JVM performance, and Jetbrains tooling.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#179

Post by keeperofdakeys »

happens wrote: post #25

It's weird, I want pretty much the exact opposite of this: a language with the expressive type system and syntax of rust, but with a garbage collector and a runtime at the cost performance. Basically go, but with rusts type system. I'm aware that there are a few languages that come close to this (crystal iirc), but in the end it's adoption and the ecosystem that keeps me from using them.

The funny thing is that rust used to have things like garbage collection. For the kind of language Rust wanted to be, removing them was a good change. But there could always be a world where it kept them.

https://pcwalton.github.io/_posts/2013-06-02-removing-garbag...

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#180

Post by naasking »

klabb3 wrote: post #27
yamrzou wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a leaky abstraction ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... ), but maybe there is no helping it and for some reason it is a necessary tradeoff for performance?

To be precise: the contract depends on the implementation. Here’s an example: I write an in memory kv cache. It’s in memory so no async needed. Now I create a trait and implement a second version with file backing. Now the children are crying because async needs to be retroactively added and also why, makes no sense etc.

It does make sense if you want other types of resources, like time and memory, to also be part of the contract. Async annotations let you do this but hiding the asynchrony does not.
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