An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language

I think this is something a lot of people here are having a hard time with: The article is not being said with a straight face. The unsolved problem of elegant I'm-holding-back-a-funny-face font technology has confounded the Internet for forty five years and still counting.

Are there design patterns that would allow us to more easily enable JIT for performance or even multithreading or GPU usage? V8, FTL and SpiderMonkey have all significantly sped up javascript performance making for much more efficient execution and better user experience. Python and PHP seem harder to adapt to JIT compilers as Facebook keeps working on HHVM for PHP and JITs for Python like PyPy lots of compatibility issues with existing libraries.

p.s. I for one really appreciate the entertainment value of exaggerated and opinionated style as long as the author realizes it is partly for entertainment, calls it out in the title and clearly isn't taking themselves too seriously. I already read enough serious and earnest tech articles...

    rel p(s, x)
     if(s = ‘a’) //this is sugar for [(s=’a’ and x=0) or x=2]
      x = 0
     else
      x = 2

     [(s=’a’ and x=0) or x=2]

     [(s=’a’ and x=0) or (s!=’a’ and x=2)]

In any language I know, "else" means "do this when the guard was _not_ true", and not "nondeterministically maybe do this other thing instead, if you want". Did I simply misunderstand it? (note that I got lost at the "soft cut" part, but did I get it right that "choose ... else" is closer to what I'd expect "if .. else" to do?)

Given that accessibility to people used to imperative languages is a core goal, I'm not sure that the choice of making "else" mean "yeah whatever" is the best one. Maybe it's better to replace it by a different keyword entirely ("if.. or.." maybe). On a related note, just in case you're not familiar with it, I believe that maybe the "if.. fi" construct in Dijkstra's Guarded Command Language[0] is an easy way to get imperative-thinking people to embrace nondeterminism. It feels a lot like normal imperative "if", except there is no "else". If you want "else", you need to add another guard explicitly, with the negation of your first guard. This way, it's easy for people to grasp that the order of the guarded commands have no meaning. It also makes introducing nondeterminism very explicit.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarded_Command_Language#Select...

2. I completely didn't understand how a functor can make a list. Note, to me, a functor is a C++ class that overrides operator(). I loved how your writeup allowed me to understand Cosmos concepts _without_ learning Prolog, so an introduction to functors (maybe a later blog post?) would be warmly appreciated :-)