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Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

ponylang.io

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Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#171

Post by dismalaf »

pphysch wrote: post #162
dismalaf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A high performance Actor-based language is fairly unique. Pony is also very fast for a garbage collected language. Also the syntax is great, probably my favourite language ever syntactically. Dunno why there's a pointless argument about it in these comments... The reference capabilities are fairly novel as well. Apart from the lack of tooling, writing in Pony is great.

If the syntax is great (I agree it doesn't seem bad at first glance) then the website attempting to sell the language should quickly demonstrate that syntax and capabilities. This is what the argument was about. "Can we see the syntax without clicking a dozen links?" "No, the syntax is not important."

Or 3rd option, the syntax is great but the creators are poor website designers because they came from the finance industry writing high performance back end systems...

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#172

Post by brightball »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #121
brightball wrote: post #96

August 15th and 16th there will be a talk on Pony at the Carolina Code Conference in Greenville, SC. https://carolina.codes

Was this meant to be a reply to the top-level story, and not a specific comment? It seems really bizarre to respond to “there should be easily-accessible examples of code that demonstrate the language’s key features on the website” with “there’s a $200 conference in South Carolina where there will be a talk on it.” Honestly, it comes across as not just bizarre, but somewhat disrespectful (though I’m sure that was not…

I just clicked the first reply button in a hurry when I saw the Pony thread. It's hard to turn off the conference promoter mode. :-)

My apologies.

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#173

Post by BobaFloutist »

perching_aix wrote: post #108
quotemstr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is textbook no true scotsman fallacy, you're aware, right?

It's really more of an inversion. No true Scotsman is "No Scotsman would ever (commit murder)" "What about (Scotsman that committed murder)?" "Ok, no true Scotsman would commit murder"

Whereas this follows the form more of "Murder is bad" "I dunno, a lot of Scotsmen commit murder" "Ok, but no true Scotsman would commit murder"

It's the same (annoying) assertion, but the fundamental argument is about the value of murder, not the category of "Scotsmen," so it's not the same extremely obvious fallacy of redefining the literal topic at hand whenever a counterexample is presented.

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#174

Post by gmfawcett »

Twey wrote: post #151
voidUpdate wrote: post #3

I wish these language websites would put an example of some code right there on the homepage so I can see what the language "feels" like. I finally found some code in the tutorials https://tutorial.ponylang.io/getting-started/hello-world

I've always loved Factor's homepage, which includes a random snippet of non-trivial (i.e. small but not ‘hello world’) code: https://factorcode.org/

(also, velociraptors)

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#175

Post by bargainbin »

whalesalad wrote: post #134
nallerooth wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Nim has a good homepage, with some bullet points explaining what the language is all about coupled with several code examples. I'm not saying Nim is better, but I visited the page the other day and thought it was neat. https://nim-lang.org/

Nim feels like the perfect language to me. Keep meaning to give it a shot for something.

Highly recommend you give it a go! Good community, great libraries and the language itself is just bonkers performant without even trying.

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#176

Post by 0x457 »

voidUpdate wrote: post #3

I wish these language websites would put an example of some code right there on the homepage so I can see what the language "feels" like. I finally found some code in the tutorials https://tutorial.ponylang.io/getting-started/hello-world

Probably hiding the fact that it's whitespace significant

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#177

Post by mindcandy »

perching_aix wrote: post #102
jibal wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Good faith argumentation, or really argumentation in general, went out the window when you started treating whether syntax matters (for this language and in general) as a universal truth / (binary) logical statement rather than just an opinion.

One of the greatest problems in argumentation over the internet is that people gravitate towards acting as if every statement is intended to define a universal truth so they can argue against that strawman.

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#178

Post by TOGoS »

tomsmeding wrote: post #109

I'm going to join the choir saying that languages need a concise description of what makes them special easily accessible — but while syntax is important, with a language like Pony (where the cool stuff is in the semantics), the cool semantics should be upfront. It seems, from some skimming of the first like 10 pages of the guide, that Pony is an object-oriented language with actors, and a built-in concept of mutabil…

I don't have a one-page overview of Pony, but I did listen to https://corecursive.com/055-unproven-with-sean-allen/ in the car a couple of times and that made me want to try it.

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#179

Post by senderista »

gpderetta wrote: post #149
gf000 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would livelock

I wouldn't call it a livelock, because I wouldn't expect the runtime to be doing any (useless) work on behalf of the program. Still, trading deadlocks for livelocks is a net negative as they are harder to identify and diagnose.

Paxos necessarily livelocks and still seems useful. More generically, all nonblocking algorithms which are only “obstruction-free” can livelock, but techniques like randomized backoff can make them quite reliable in practice (just like Paxos/Raft).

Re: Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

#180

Post by [deleted] »

unbrice wrote: post #125
gpderetta wrote: post #71

> Deadlock-Free: This one is easy because Pony has no locks at all! So they definitely don’t deadlock, because they don’t exist! This really annoys me every time I read Pony description. What does deadlock free even mean here? Deadlock-free is typically the property of an algorithm, not a language. Does pony guarantees forward progress in all cases? Does it means that if I tried to implement a python interpreter in P…

It would be technically deadlock free because you'd have a state that is unable to progress forward but it wouldn't technically involve a synchronisation primitive. In my view a real deadlock would actually be easier to debug but I'm just a caveman.

[deleted]
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