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The Austral Programming Language

austral-lang.org

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Re: The Austral Programming Language

#21

Post by jonathankoren »

seagreen wrote: post #13

Did not expect docs to be this exciting... On July 3, 1940, as part of Operation Catapult, Royal Air Force pilots bombed the ships of the French Navy stationed off Mers-el-Kébir to prevent them falling into the hands of the Third Reich. This is Austral’s approach to error handling: scuttle the ship without delay.

Given how controversial the British attack was on their allies even after the French assured them that ships would not be captured, I guess this passage is, as the kids say, "shots fired". :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-Kébir

Re: The Austral Programming Language

#22

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

dataangel wrote: post #15
convolvatron wrote: post #3

I can understand the intent behind most of the design 'no's - except for subtyping. why is this a problem? I was just looking at the union/sum distinction and the same thing came up. maybe this is a good learning moment.

PL designers like to cast features that make their job harder and user's life easier as "anti-features"

This.

Re: The Austral Programming Language

#23

Post by amw-zero »

iroddis wrote: post #5

This quite a shallow observation, but I really wish new languages would cut down on verbosity and boilerplate. Making people type out “function” instead of “fn”, “def”, or nothing at all feels like unneeded friction. I’m not looking for APL levels of terseness, but I also don’t want to have my code mistaken for an essay filled with what amounts to scaffolding.

For every person that says this, there's 5 people that say the opposite.

Re: The Austral Programming Language

#25

Post by stronglikedan »

iroddis wrote: post #5

This quite a shallow observation, but I really wish new languages would cut down on verbosity and boilerplate. Making people type out “function” instead of “fn”, “def”, or nothing at all feels like unneeded friction. I’m not looking for APL levels of terseness, but I also don’t want to have my code mistaken for an essay filled with what amounts to scaffolding.

I'm the opposite. I find the code much easier to read when it's verbose, including very long, descriptive function names and the like. And with modern IDEs and autocomplete, it's not really making people type out anything longer than the first couple of letters anyway. The gains are on the backend, where people are reading the code. And don't even get me started on unnecessary aliases in SQL!

Re: The Austral Programming Language

#26

Post by hardwaregeek »

hyperhello wrote: post #8
iroddis wrote: post #5

This quite a shallow observation, but I really wish new languages would cut down on verbosity and boilerplate. Making people type out “function” instead of “fn”, “def”, or nothing at all feels like unneeded friction. I’m not looking for APL levels of terseness, but I also don’t want to have my code mistaken for an essay filled with what amounts to scaffolding.

I’d like it to just look exactly like C, but with new ideas in some incompatible syntax showing it is not part of C.

Ehh C is a pretty miserable language to parse. No function definition keyword means you have to get pretty far to realize that you're parsing a function. Pointer syntax is ambiguous with expression grouping. And let's not even get started with the preprocessor. I'd say a good model for simple syntax is Go. Rust has a nice compromise of syntax too, but there are some awkward edge cases.

Re: The Austral Programming Language

#27

Post by wredue »

amw-zero wrote: post #23
iroddis wrote: post #5

This quite a shallow observation, but I really wish new languages would cut down on verbosity and boilerplate. Making people type out “function” instead of “fn”, “def”, or nothing at all feels like unneeded friction. I’m not looking for APL levels of terseness, but I also don’t want to have my code mistaken for an essay filled with what amounts to scaffolding.

For every person that says this, there's 5 people that say the opposite.

That’s because it fundamentally doesn’t actually impact all that much.

By most people’s account, the actual coding part of programming isn’t really a majority of their time. Domain research, speccing, debugging, testing, planning, etc. the microscopic savings in key presses are just really such a strange thing to even debate about when you think about it.

Major tersness pushes also tend to cause “symbol soup” and, personally, I find symbol soup very hard to digest.

Re: The Austral Programming Language

#28

Post by Yasuraka »

iroddis wrote: post #5

This quite a shallow observation, but I really wish new languages would cut down on verbosity and boilerplate. Making people type out “function” instead of “fn”, “def”, or nothing at all feels like unneeded friction. I’m not looking for APL levels of terseness, but I also don’t want to have my code mistaken for an essay filled with what amounts to scaffolding.

Reminds me of this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE

And the quote to go along with it:

"I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise?"

Re: The Austral Programming Language

#30

Post by Scarbutt »

mrkeen wrote: post #16

This language looks super promising. With the exceptions of 'no type inference' and 'no arithmetic precedence', I really like its anti-features list. With regard to 'no arithmetic precedence', I tried printLn((1 + 2) + 3); and printLn(1 + 2 + 3); Sure enough, the first one compiles, but the second doesn't. Also, (n-1) is a parse error unless you put a space after the minus. I got curious if recursion was properly han…

I would add 'no macros' being a no no too.
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