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Misty: A secure distributed actor language

mistysystem.com

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Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#21

Post by swiftcoder »

tossandthrow wrote: post #16
swiftcoder wrote: post #6

Regardless of the merits of the language itself, the presentation here leaves something to be desired. The landing page itself conveys zero information, and when I click into the Introduction, it's almost entirely dedicated to a particularly persnickety whitespace standard, and the grammar rules for parsing comments and identifiers. This is not really helping me understand what the language is about... Between that a…

> I have the sense that the author is more interested in grinding axes than in explaining. People are free to target whoever they want when publishing on the internet. There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target.

> There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target.

I mean, I'm at least tangentially in the target audience, as an enthusiast of programming language design, who is very fond of Erlang...

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#22

Post by tossandthrow »

swiftcoder wrote: post #21
tossandthrow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have the sense that the author is more interested in grinding axes than in explaining. People are free to target whoever they want when publishing on the internet. There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target.

> There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target. I mean, I'm at least tangentially in the target audience, as an enthusiast of programming language design, who is very fond of Erlang...

It is the assumption that this is meant as dissemination. there is a lot of material online (especially on GitHub) that is not meant to be read.

It is a valid criticism that it is uninteresting to read, but the core criticism is that this should not have been shared on HN, to which the canonical response is to scroll through and not upvote.

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#23

Post by davexunit »

davexunit wrote: post #13
openrisk wrote: post #4

Curious if this overlaps at all with the use cases of the spritely project [1]. Another question is whether esoteric languages are strictly needed for these architectures or simply more convenient. [1] https://spritely.institute/

Douglas Crockford has described Misty as vaporware (hence the name), whereas at Spritely we are building and shipping things that can be used. Rather than build an entirely standalone domain specific language, our research and development builds on top of Scheme because it's a multi-paradigm language that is easy to extend to implement new paradigms (such as the actor model) thanks to the powerful macro system. Lexic…

I should clarify that when he calls it vaporware he means that he is interested in propagating the actor model concept rather than any specific language or implementation.

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#24

Post by throwawaymaths »

evomassiny wrote: post #12

An interesting project, but it seems to be in its infancy :) I definitely want an actor based language to play with, and something with a strong type system would be perfect. gleam [1] and inko [2] look promising in this regard [1] https://gleam.run/ [2] https://inko-lang.org/

fundamentally I think though is that for distributed systems you don't really want actors, you want ~erlang processes. The distinction being around how errors propagate between processes, and various mechanisms to deal with that. The actor model doesn't have any of that in its theoretical basis. Because in a distributed system you fundamentally have unpredictable errors, and generally erlang tries to shoehorn you into a programming style where you're ok with faults, which makes your system more fault tolerant.

The core philosophical problem with gleam is that it is trying to get rid of errors. Ok, well good luck with that.

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#25

Post by mirekrusin »

thebestjames wrote: post #14
mirekrusin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...author is Douglas Crockford, creator of JavaScript and JSON.

Brendan Eich (of more recent Brave fame) is the creator of JavaScript.

Thanks for correction, indeed I mixed him up, Crockford just created JSON parser and popularized this format (he also popularized js in general though his book, linter etc).

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#26

Post by WorldMaker »

swiftcoder wrote: post #6

Regardless of the merits of the language itself, the presentation here leaves something to be desired. The landing page itself conveys zero information, and when I click into the Introduction, it's almost entirely dedicated to a particularly persnickety whitespace standard, and the grammar rules for parsing comments and identifiers. This is not really helping me understand what the language is about... Between that a…

A similar presentation bug that stands out to me, the "Public Domain by Author" copyright claims are non-standard and don't actually do anything legally speaking in the US or many other world jurisdictions, and feel kind of silly/out-of-place. Maybe they are a political statement, but I think that just makes them more annoying, not less. This is why CC0 [0] exists and provides a ton of useful explanations and FAQ and suggestions on dedicating works to the public domain in a way that legally works/matters. Also as a reminder CC0 is not an OSI-approved code license and for that you should consider using something like CC0 "dual licensed" with "1-Clause BSD" [1] for software code. (Though CC0 is directly FSF approved now [and generally considered GPL family compatible], with suggested License verbiage in the CC0 FAQ.)

[0] https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0/

[1] https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-1-Clause.html

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#27

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #24
evomassiny wrote: post #12

An interesting project, but it seems to be in its infancy :) I definitely want an actor based language to play with, and something with a strong type system would be perfect. gleam [1] and inko [2] look promising in this regard [1] https://gleam.run/ [2] https://inko-lang.org/

fundamentally I think though is that for distributed systems you don't really want actors, you want ~erlang processes. The distinction being around how errors propagate between processes, and various mechanisms to deal with that. The actor model doesn't have any of that in its theoretical basis. Because in a distributed system you fundamentally have unpredictable errors, and generally erlang tries to shoehorn you int…

I've been meaning to get to know gleam better, so I'm interested in your comment.

Do you mean that the error handling of an Erlang process is in any way diminished by using gleam? Or is it just that maybe it's unnecessary work to try so hard to prevent errors which you've already put so much into tolerating?

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#28

Post by withoutboats3 »

davexunit wrote: post #11
faraaz98 wrote: post #5

Tldr for erlang users?

Erlang actors are not privately addressable, so they cannot be used for capability security. The actors described here are.

Joe Armstrong goes to lengths to describe the benefits of "privately addressable" actors in his thesis (though he uses different terminology). As far as I'm aware, Erlang actors are also privately addressable. cf:

> System security is intimately connected with the idea of knowing the name of a process. If we do not know the name of a process we cannot interact with it in any way, thus the system is secure. Once the names of processes become widely know the system becomes less secure. We call the process of revealing names to other processes in a controlled manner the name distribution problem— the key to security lies in the name distribution problem. When we reveal a Pid to another process we will say that we have published the name of the process. If a name is never published there are no security problems.

> Thus knowing the name of a process is the key element of security. Since names are unforgeable the system is secure only if we can limit the knowledge of the names of the processes to trusted processes.

https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf (page 24-25)

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#29

Post by SoftTalker »

withoutboats3 wrote: post #28
davexunit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erlang actors are not privately addressable, so they cannot be used for capability security. The actors described here are.

Joe Armstrong goes to lengths to describe the benefits of "privately addressable" actors in his thesis (though he uses different terminology). As far as I'm aware, Erlang actors are also privately addressable. cf: > System security is intimately connected with the idea of knowing the name of a process. If we do not know the name of a process we cannot interact with it in any way, thus the system is secure. Once the n…

This really only works if the process names are unguessable? Erlang PIDs are if not predicatable at least appear to be guessable, e.g. they look like this:

Re: Misty: A secure distributed actor language

#30

Post by dang »

macintux wrote: post #2

A fair bit of discussion from a year ago: https://lobste.rs/s/r8vitn/misty_programing_language_from_cr... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38820305 There are a few older discussions on HN, but none with more than single digit comments.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Misty Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38820305 - Dec 2023 (47 comments)

Creator of JSON Unveils New Programming Language 'Misty' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680087 - Dec 2023 (6 comments)

Doug Crockford's new programming language – Misty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38620026 - Dec 2023 (3 comments)

Misty: Programing Language from the Creator of JSON - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38114122 - Nov 2023 (3 comments)

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