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

Dada, an experimental new programming language

dada-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 428 posts

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#201

Post by wredue »

couchand wrote: post #123
sanderjd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In college, my programming languages class used a language called "Mystery" (I believe created by my professor), which was configurable . Assignments would be like "write some test programs to figure out whether the language is configured to use pass-by-value or pass-by-reference". And there were a bunch of other knobs that could be turned, and in each case, the idea was that we could figure out the knob's setting by…

Don't be so quick to discount DSLs. Sure, you don't want a half-baked DSL when some simple imperative code would do. But if you watch your API evolve into an algebra and then don't formalize it with a DSL you might be leaving powerful tools for understanding on the table. A poor-fitting language is terrible for abstract thinking, on the other hand an internally-consistent and domain appropriate language can unlock ne…

The problem a lot of people have with DSLs is… well, just look at a prime example: SAS.

If you’re an experienced programmer coming in to SAS, your vocabulary for the next LONG time is going to consist primarily of “What The Fuck is this shit?!?”

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#202

Post by moomin »

rob74 wrote: post #176
OtomotO wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-native-speaker take: I don't care, it just reads a bit "weird" as I learned English before and "theirs" was plural... but I am adaptable. As long as the meaning of the quote isn't changed I couldn't care less and it seems very important to some people. What I personally dislike though is the whole "Ask me my pronouns" thing... like "No, I don't care about your gender or sex, as long as I am not interested in a ro…

The "singular they" has been a thing in English for a long time (since the 14th century according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they ). I'm a non-native speaker as well, and wasn't taught about it in school either (maybe that has changed in the meantime?). The first time I consciously noticed it is probably in the Sting song If You Love Somebody Set Them Free ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If…

Yeah, it's been commonly used when the object (in the grammatical sense) would typically have a gender but it is unspecified. In fact, it's so common native English speakers don't even notice they're doing it. (Which produces a steady stream of unintentional humor from those pretending it isn't a thing.) The usage as a sign of respect for specific non-binary and other gender non-confirming people is more modern (2009 is apparently the first recorded example). Although to a great extent, it doesn't matter. Language evolves over time and dictionary definitions necessarily trail usage.

The wikipedia article is quite detailed and will probably supply more information that anyone particularly wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#203

Post by wredue »

gary17the wrote: post #108
amw-zero wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language has a paved road, and when you go off of that road you are key with extreme annoyance and friction every step of the way. You’re telling people to just ignore the paved road of Rust, which is bad advice.

No, not really. Firstly, there is no significant "friction" to using Rust smart pointers and internal mutability primitives, as those constructs have been added to Rust for a reason: to solve certain borrow checker edge cases (e.g., multiply interconnected data structures), so they are treated by the Rust ecosystem as first-class citizens. Secondly, those constructs make a pretty good educational tool. By the time pe…

I find quite a lot of friction in being demanded to understand all of the methods, what they do, when you’d use them, why you’d choose one over another that does a slightly different thing, but maybe still fits.

The method documentation alone in reference counting is more pages than some entire programming languages. That’s beside the necessary knowledge for using it.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#204

Post by sanderjd »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #121
sanderjd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think syntax for Arc (and/or Rc or some generalization of the two) and more "cultural" support for writing in that style would have benefitted rust back when 1.0 was being finalized. But I think the cow is out of the barn now on what rust "is" and that it isn't this.

Yes, if you think about it, it's a bit weird that async gets first syntactical class treatment in the language but reference counting does not. A similar approach of adding a syntactical form but not mandating a particular impl could have been taken, I think. Same for Box, but in fact Rust went the opposite way and turfed the Box ~ sigil. Which I actually feel was a mistake, but I'm no language designer.

Yeah, but personally I think Rc/Arc is more deserving of syntax than Box!

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#205

Post by yodsanklai »

OtomotO wrote: post #162
sorenjan wrote: post #138

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do. > Updated to use modern pronouns. https://dada-lang.org/docs/about/

Non-native-speaker take: I don't care, it just reads a bit "weird" as I learned English before and "theirs" was plural... but I am adaptable. As long as the meaning of the quote isn't changed I couldn't care less and it seems very important to some people. What I personally dislike though is the whole "Ask me my pronouns" thing... like "No, I don't care about your gender or sex, as long as I am not interested in a ro…

> Non-native-speaker take: I don't care, it just reads a bit "weird" as I learned English before and "theirs" was plural...

Non-native speaker too, I find it easier to adjust in English compared to my native language (French), probably because the language is less engrained in me. I embraced the English neutral pleural - it's even convenient - but I found myself a bit more annoyed with the so called French *écriture inclusive", such as "les étudiant.e.s sont fatigué.e.s". Not really pretty IMHO. We could find something better..

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#206

Post by samatman »

benrutter wrote: post #65

I love the idea of a "thought experiment language" - actually creating a working language is a big overhead, and its really fun to think about what an ideal language might look like. The crazy thing with reading this and the comments, is that it seems like we all have been daydreaming about completely different versions of a "high level rust" and what that would look like. For me I'd just want a dynamic run time + si…

The gradual type systems you're referring to are bolted onto the languages, or in Elixir's case, the runtime. If you want to see what a language with a deeply integrated gradual type system is like, take a look at Julia. I've found it to be both expressive and precise.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#208

Post by dahart »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #117
baq wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you want something like 'debug_msg()' for this. 'print()' should be async because it does IO. In the real world most likely you'd see the output once you yield.

> 'print()' should be async because it does IO What if I want to do synchronous IO?

Then use .await?
Post reply on HN