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Dada, an experimental new programming language

dada-lang.org

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Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#291

Post by DinaCoder99 »

wongarsu wrote: post #91
DinaCoder99 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, typically print is the debug message function vs explicitly writing to stdout

In rust, the common debug message function would be log::info! or log::debug!, with two lines of setup to make logs print to stderr. Or for something more ad-hock, there's dbg! (which adds context what you are printing, and doesn't care about your logging config). Not that people don't use print for the purpose, but it's basically never the best choice. I assume Dada is conceived with the same mindset.

I disagree—println! is far more common for every day printf debugging than the log crate is. Do i have any evidence of this? No, but it takes less to type and is harder to mess up with log levels while working just as effectively.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#292

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Yes, but then you need to be able to market your DSL and get buy-in. Otherwise you will forever be just a team of one. And then need to sell to all the stakeholders of the project the idea of trusting one person for all the development.

So in addition to the skill of creating a DSL, you need the skills of thoroughly documenting it, training other people to use it, creating tools for it, and explaining the benefits in a way that gets them more excited than just using an existing Boring Old Programming Language.

Which is certainly possible. You can get non developers excited if they can use it for answering their own questions or creating their own business rules, for example. But it's a distinct skill set from cranking out code to solve problems. It requires a strong understanding of the UX (or DX) implications of this new language.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#293

Post by jimbokun »

couchand wrote: post #143
jacobr1 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related notion is that you need strong, well-thought out, and when the system is changing, regularly refactored abstractions. You might not need a DSL but your class/type/trait designs needs to be sane, your API needs to be solid, etc ... DDD principles are key here.

Yes, eat your vegetables! A question of philosophy: If you have all that, don't you already have a DSL, using a deep embedding in the host language?

Yes, but the language in which you create your framework can do a lot of the heavy lifting. For example, if your main interface is a REST API, there is a large body of knowledge of best practices, educational resources, and existing tools for interacting with it.

With a new DSL, you need to create all of that yourself.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#294

Post by steveklabnik »

luke-stanley wrote: post #261
steveklabnik wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is aprint “non leaky” but print.await “leaky”?

Hey Steve, I wouldn't say that "print.await" is a leak abstraction. I think "print.await" is explicit and that's good, it communicates it's abstraction fairly clearly, presumably following a pattern used commonly in this, imagined language. I suppose that a wrapper like "aprint" (a convenience function labelled async, like with an "a" prefix), would be a bit better than having people continually try using print, not…

I agree with you personally on print.await; maybe I replied to the wrong person on this thread, ha!.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#295

Post by subtra3t »

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…

People who want others to ask them their pronouns before referring to them, what is your reason for doing so?

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#296

Post by pama »

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.

In Python if you carelessly print within a multiprocess part of an application you may end up getting a nonreproducible mess on stdout with multiple streams merged at random points. So the cognitive load in this example is that this new language is meant for multithreaded coding and can make multithreading easy compared to other languages.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#299

Post by BoppreH »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #196
BoppreH wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered if global type inference wouldn't be a game changer. Maybe it could be fast enough with caching and careful language semantics? You could still have your IDE showing you type hints as documentation, but have inferred types to be more fine grained than humans have patience for. Track units, container emptiness, numeric ranges, side effects and idempotency, tainted values for security, maybe even e…

Type inference is powerful but probably too powerful for module-level (e.g. global) declarations. Despite type systems being powerful enough to figure out what types should be via unification, I don't think asking programmers to write the types of module declarations is too much. This is one area where forcing work on the programmer is really useful to ensure that they are tracking boundary interface changes correctl…

People accept manually entering types only at a relatively high level. It'd be different if types were "function that takes a non-empty list of even numbers between 2 and 100, and a possibly tainted non-negative non-NaN float in meters/second, returning a length-4 alphanumeric string without side effects in O(n)".
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