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Dada, an experimental new programming language

dada-lang.org

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Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#21

Post by usrusr »

brabel wrote: post #2

If the claim that its performance will be similar to Rust's if you add type annotations, this could become a really attractive language! As easy as JavaScript to write, as fast as Rust when the extra effort to write it justifies it.

Still super weird, because the garbage collector tax that is avoided by the borrow checker that's decidedly not gone isn't all that big to begin with.

But perhaps it's a viable "training wheels" approach for getting used to borrow-checker friendly patterns? And I guess a scripting interpreter option that is fully rust-aware in terms of lifetimes could be truly golden for certain use cases, even if it turns out to be completely hostile to users not fully in tune with the underlying Rust. Sometimes "no recompile" is very important.

I wonder if the genesis story of the project might be hidden in "Dada has a required runtime": perhaps it started with the what-if of "how nice could we make Rust if we abandoned our strict "no runtime!" stance and went for making it runtime-heavy like e.g. Scala"? Then the runtime pulls in more and more responsibility until it's easier to consume a raw AST and from there it's not all that far to making types optional.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#22

Post by mtsr »

yamrzou wrote: post #19
Alifatisk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasoning with await is valid, it's an I/O call, but the await should maybe be hidden inside the print then?

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?

Maybe it’s actually a non-leaky abstraction because it makes the async-nature explicit. The alternative is hiding it, but it’s still going to affect your code, making that effectively a leaky abstraction.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#25

Post by happens »

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.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#26

Post by GardenLetter27 »

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.

Yeah, same for a scripting language too - something like Lua but as expressive as Rust.

There is Rune, but like you mentioned the issue is adoption, etc.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#27

Post by klabb3 »

yamrzou wrote: post #19
Alifatisk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasoning with await is valid, it's an I/O call, but the await should maybe be hidden inside the print then?

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.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#28

Post by secondcoming »

yamrzou wrote: post #6

Their Hello, Dada! example: print("...").await I'm coming from Python, and I can't help but ask: If my goal as a programmer is to simply print to the console, why should I care about the await? This already starts with a non zero complexity and some cognitive load, like the `public static void main` from Java.

Surely `public static void main` has less congnitive load than

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        main()

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#29

Post by thegeekpirate »

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.

Right? One day... sigh

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#30

Post by quadrature »

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.

You’ve just described scala.
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