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

301–310 of 428 posts

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#301

Post by bmitc »

pama wrote: post #296
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.

That's a great example of the "simplicity" of Python being anything but.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#302

Post by bmitc »

asplake wrote: post #214
jug wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, F# is an often forgotten gem in this new, brighter cross-platform .NET world. :)

:-) Is F# a contender outside the .NET world?

What do you mean by "outside the .NET world"? F# is a .NET language (more specifically a CLR language). That question seems to be like asking "are Erlang and Elixir contenders outside of the BEAM world?" or "is Clojure a contender outside of the JVM world?".

F# being on top of the CLR and .NET is a benefit. It is very easy to install .NET, and it comes with a huge amount of functionality.

If you're asking if the language F# could be ported to another VM, then I'd say yes, but I don't see the point unless that VM offered similar and additional functionality.

You can use F# as if C# didn't exist, if that's what you mean, and by treating .NET and CLR as an implementation detail, which they effectively are.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#303

Post by convolvatron »

jacobr1 wrote: post #141
couchand wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the GP was merely suggesting a less-costly alternative. Perhaps building a complete standalone compiler or interpreter is hard, but we're all designing APIs in our programming languange of choice day in and day out. Both strategies are very hard, but one of then is "build a prototype in a weekend" hard and one of them is "build a prototype is a month" hard.

It is interesting to consider how much the lower abstraction influences the higher abstraction. If you are building on a existing language/runtime/framework then you can inherit more functionality and move faster, but also you implicitly will inherent many of the design decisions and tradeoffs.

totally. for me the interplay between the host language and the target language is hardest thing for me to manage when bringing up a new environment. it really doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, but it comes down to the sad reality that we operate by rote alot of the time, and completely switching semantic modes when going between one world and the other is confusing and imposes a real cost.

I'm still not that good at it, but my best strategy to date is to try to work in a restricted environment of both the host and the target that are nearly the same.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#304

Post by mike_ivanov »

secondcoming wrote: post #28
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.

Surely `public static void main` has less congnitive load than if __name__ == "__main__": main()

It should have been implemented as `def __main__(): ...`

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#305

Post by obeavs »

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…

For what it's worth, Moonbit (https://www.moonbitlang.com/) is a really nice take on this. Designed by the guys who created Rescript for OCAML, but for WASM-first world.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#306

Post by neonsunset »

bmitc wrote: post #302
asplake wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-) Is F# a contender outside the .NET world?

What do you mean by "outside the .NET world"? F# is a .NET language (more specifically a CLR language). That question seems to be like asking "are Erlang and Elixir contenders outside of the BEAM world?" or "is Clojure a contender outside of the JVM world?". F# being on top of the CLR and .NET is a benefit . It is very easy to install .NET, and it comes with a huge amount of functionality. If you're asking if the lan…

This conversation could be referring to https://fable.io/

Other than that, the question is indeed strange and I agree with your statements.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#308

Post by lamontcg »

wredue wrote: post #219
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.

Just going to be honest here: “Zero complexity print to the screen” Is, quite possibly, the dumbest argument people make in favour of one language over another. For experienced people, a cursory glance at the definitions should be enough. For new programmers, ignoring that part “for now” is perfectly fine. So to is “most programming languages, even low level ones, have a runtime that you need to provide an entry poin…

This does surface the fact that its another await/async red/green function language though.

If they're already making it gradually typed and not low-level, I don't understand why they don't throw away the C ABI-ness of it and make it more like Ruby with fibers/coroutines that don't need async/await.

I'd like parametric polymorphism and dynamic dispatch and more reflection as well if we're going to be making a non-low-level rust that doesn't have to be as fast as humanly possible.

(And honestly I'd probably like to keep it statically typed with those escape hatches given first-class citizen status instead of the bolted on hacks they often wind up being)

[Ed: also rather than go back to object oriented, I'd rather see really easy composition, delegation and dependency injection without boilerplate code and with strongly typed interfaces]

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#310

Post by kaba0 »

bmitc wrote: post #302
asplake wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-) Is F# a contender outside the .NET world?

What do you mean by "outside the .NET world"? F# is a .NET language (more specifically a CLR language). That question seems to be like asking "are Erlang and Elixir contenders outside of the BEAM world?" or "is Clojure a contender outside of the JVM world?". F# being on top of the CLR and .NET is a benefit . It is very easy to install .NET, and it comes with a huge amount of functionality. If you're asking if the lan…

You are generally right, but Clojure is a bad example, it is quite deliberately a “hosted” language, that can and does have many implementations for different platforms, e.g. ClojureScript.
Post reply on HN