Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax • Hacker News Board

Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax

#31

Post by krylon » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 2:54 PM UTC

onetokeoverthe wrote: post #24

krylon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently have the "pleasure" of building a SharePoint workflow, which is done by clicking together building blocks in a graphical builder (running as part of Visual Studio). Maybe I am generalizing to hastily, but I absolutely despise the experience. In theory it sounds like a nice concept, in practice it tends to make trivial tasks exceedingly complicated[1]. And what would be a screen of code is several screens…

You'd probably appreciate the movie Zero Theorem. The hero, a coder, is doing the same procedure...it's by the Monty Python people.

Thank you!

Terry Gilliam has made some great movies (although I found Tideland too intense to watch). This one is now on the top of my to-watch list.

Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax

#32

Post by sanjiva » Wed, Jul 05, 2017, 8:03 PM UTC

ivanbakel wrote: post #9

There's looking to be a lot of value in visual languages - this isn't the first one to hit the FP in the last few weeks. We're probably beginning to appreciate the limits of text-based programming, and hopefully enough work goes into something different to create a tool with real productivity using visual code. The only trouble I can see is that there isn't a lot of speed at the moment in dragging and dropping to cre…

I'm leading the Ballerina language design. The team has about 15 engineers working on the runtime (and related tools) and about another 15 folks working on the browser-based composer and the IDE plugins.

Ballerina's design point is to be a language with semantically equivalent text and graphic syntaxes. Its not a "visual language" really .. its a language with alternative syntaxes, one text and one graphic.

That approach eliminates the "hit-the-wall" phenomenon of visual languages. And as other commenters have said, a lot of the graphical view is useful to understand overall structure and less to write lots of code. However, parallel code is much better visualized graphically as sequence diagrams are dead simple to grok.

In terms of speed of the current Composer .. still WIP. Help is welcome :).

Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax

#33

Post by sanjiva » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 11:41 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #29

sanjiva wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet .. but we have a design for tracing the execution flow of every run at near zero cost and then playing back the execution trace. That's not saving all intermediate state but if you save the input (usually an HTTP request; so its saved in the logs) then you can easily debug production issues with it. If you meant debugging type stuff yes there's debugging already, including from the Idea plugin.

Could one eventually build a TCP in Ballerina where the animated diagram is the program?

I missed replying to this .. yes one could easily.

Making that perform at the same level as a TCP driver written in C could be a bit challenging .. but not impossible.

In fact, expressing network interaction protocols is one motivation for the sequence diagram approach, but the expectation was higher level stuff like OpenID or SAML type interactions.