Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Flix Programming Language

flix.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 126 posts

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#21

Post by Hemospectrum »

qsort wrote: post #7
ashton314 wrote: post #2

Woah, the effect system looks really neat at first glance. Also, “region-based local mutation” so your pure functions can use mutation under the hood for performance? Sweet!

I'd like to see an experimental language that leans hard into the concept of controlled mutation. I always say that purely in terms of design my ideal language is high-level Haskell, low-level C. Conceptually, purely functional design is how programming "should" (note the quotes) be, but doing so down to the level of functions is both not very practical (some algorithms are just easier to express in terms pointers mo…

> I always say that purely in terms of design my ideal language is high-level Haskell, low-level C.

That's similar to what I used to say. I was devastated to see the BitC project implode, but then Rust appeared and took up the mantle. It's not perfect by any means but it's influential enough to drag the whole field of PL development kicking and screaming in that general direction.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#22

Post by [deleted] »

liamilan wrote: post #16

Just a friendly UBC piggyback on Waterloo’s programming language ;) Over summer, I built my own little functional language, Crumb ( https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb ). Unlike Flix, the scope is tiny, but some pretty awesome stuff has been done with it. (Checkout this pixel art editor in your terminal, 100% Crumb: https://github.com/ronilan/crumbicon ). There’s a template ( https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-templat…

[deleted]

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#23

Post by usrbinbash »

globalnode wrote: post #10
michaelsbradley wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you worry about side-effects that leak beyond the scope of the routines you're authoring? Why / why not?

i do, does functional programming make this a non issue? maybe im just not smart enough to wrap my head around it.

Yes and no.

In theory, writing in a functional language that allows only "pure" functions (aka. functions w.o. side effects), makes it easier to control state.

In practice, side effects exists and are required for programs to do anything useful.

In my opinion, one mistake of many purely functional languages was to be so focused on this purity, that it made it needlessly hard to write useful code in them, especially for people coming from an imperative/procedural/oop style of doing things. And you need these people if you want your method to gain traction, because the vast majority of code written, is imperative.

The irony is, that FP could probably have had a lot more success if it didn't clamour on about pure functions so much, and was less focused on implementations (aka. languages) than on methodology (aka. coding style) Because it is perfectly possible to write pure functions in most languages, including OOP language, even if those functions are not "pure" internally, or are not "pure" all the time and under all circumstances.

And yes, doing so has really nice advantages. I have refactored quite alot of codebases into using a more functional approach, and what I found was that this makes it harder to introduce bugs, makes it easier to track bugs, and makes it easier to reason about my code.

So yeah, functional programming, used if and where it makes sense, does work, and is useful.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#24

Post by thefourthchime »

In today's world, i think that English is the only programming language that people should focus on.

With the rapid rise of AI, most tasks will soon involve the management of AI models rather than writing code. However, it is still important to have a basic understanding of coding.

Introducing a new programming language at this point seems silly to me.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#25

Post by IshKebab »

Top marks for the website - passes all the tests:

* Example at the top

* Link to playground

* Explanation of all the features, with examples!

* Says which features are unique

The only thing I was found wondering was "why datalog"?

Language looks pretty good.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#27

Post by qsort »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #21
qsort wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see an experimental language that leans hard into the concept of controlled mutation. I always say that purely in terms of design my ideal language is high-level Haskell, low-level C. Conceptually, purely functional design is how programming "should" (note the quotes) be, but doing so down to the level of functions is both not very practical (some algorithms are just easier to express in terms pointers mo…

> I always say that purely in terms of design my ideal language is high-level Haskell, low-level C. That's similar to what I used to say. I was devastated to see the BitC project implode, but then Rust appeared and took up the mantle. It's not perfect by any means but it's influential enough to drag the whole field of PL development kicking and screaming in that general direction.

I agree in re Rust.

In spite of all the retarded monkeys in its fanbase, I always thought it was an interesting project. Popular languages today are much more similar than they used to be, they are basically "converging", Rust's willingness to try something new must be applauded.

Still many pain points, still a bit of a "puzzle language", too much of a scatterbrain approach in the governance and design direction, but even if it had no other influence than to force people to think about the problems of low-level programming, that would be still a massive plus in my book.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#28

Post by dangerlibrary »

thefourthchime wrote: post #24

In today's world, i think that English is the only programming language that people should focus on. With the rapid rise of AI, most tasks will soon involve the management of AI models rather than writing code. However, it is still important to have a basic understanding of coding. Introducing a new programming language at this point seems silly to me.

This reads like a take from a mid-level manager rationalizing that they never learned to code, and convincing themselves that they'll never need to.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#29

Post by rscho »

thefourthchime wrote: post #24

In today's world, i think that English is the only programming language that people should focus on. With the rapid rise of AI, most tasks will soon involve the management of AI models rather than writing code. However, it is still important to have a basic understanding of coding. Introducing a new programming language at this point seems silly to me.

Security-critical tasks and programming language research will involve humans coding for the foreseeable future. I don't think you'd like your surgical robot to be programmed in English.

Re: The Flix Programming Language

#30

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

usrbinbash wrote: post #23
globalnode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i do, does functional programming make this a non issue? maybe im just not smart enough to wrap my head around it.

Yes and no. In theory, writing in a functional language that allows only "pure" functions (aka. functions w.o. side effects), makes it easier to control state. In practice, side effects exists and are required for programs to do anything useful. In my opinion, one mistake of many purely functional languages was to be so focused on this purity, that it made it needlessly hard to write useful code in them, especially f…

> The irony is, that FP could probably have had a lot more success if it didn't clamour on about pure functions so much

Except functional languages like Lisps and the MLs never were pure, the only (used by a significant number of people) has been Miranda/Haskell (ignoring Coq and the other proof assistents). Or, to put it in other words: ML (no, not that ML) turned 50 this year, Scheme is oder than 50 too and Miranda/Haskell ~36. There never had been a shortage of "impure" functional languages since OOP existed.

Post reply on HN