Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language • Hacker News Board

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#41

Post by angara » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:41 PM UTC

vmchale wrote: post #32

Blackthorn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre criticism. Most of the newer popular functional languages aren't implemented in those, but rather Java, and for the same reason given in the readme for Go.

> Most of the newer popular functional languages aren't implemented in those, but rather Java, I don't think this is true. Java is not a good language for compilers in any case, and it would cause me to trust the language less, especially if they were claiming it was a "functional programming language"

> Java is not a good language for compilers

Could you elaborate?

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#42

Post by samatman » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

I just want to say that "Ko" is an excellent name for a deadlock-free language written in Go. Kudos.

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#43

Post by kierenj » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

nikofeyn wrote: post #38

yiyus wrote: post #2

There is not a single example in the README. I checked the step-by-step guide, but it starts with installation and documentation instructions, then imports, and I don't know yet how the language feels like. Ok, let's check that handbook then. Computation model, type system, ... Please, I just want to see a program with a dozen lines of code to see what it looks like. Of course, more extended examples with the intende…

isn't this a little demanding and entitled? for example, the submitter of this post to hacker news may not be the creator of the language and repository. so the creator is off just having some fun creating a language, with more than minimal documentation, and uploads it to github to track changes and generally make it public. then someone thinks it's interesting and posts it here, and the top comment is someone with…

I don't think it's aggressive at all. They're literally presenting a language. A language. They talk about its virtues but I mean come on, how do you introduce a language?

Bonjour!

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#44

Post by mcphage » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC

nikofeyn wrote: post #38

yiyus wrote: post #2

There is not a single example in the README. I checked the step-by-step guide, but it starts with installation and documentation instructions, then imports, and I don't know yet how the language feels like. Ok, let's check that handbook then. Computation model, type system, ... Please, I just want to see a program with a dozen lines of code to see what it looks like. Of course, more extended examples with the intende…

isn't this a little demanding and entitled? for example, the submitter of this post to hacker news may not be the creator of the language and repository. so the creator is off just having some fun creating a language, with more than minimal documentation, and uploads it to github to track changes and generally make it public. then someone thinks it's interesting and posts it here, and the top comment is someone with…

> isn't this a little demanding and entitled?

No.

The poster shared it to HN because they want other people to look at it. Which is fine, but they're asking for our attention, and they need to respect that fact—and us—and not waste our time. Sharing a new language but making us dig around to understand one of the most fundamental things about the language—what the code looks like—does not respect us, our time, or our attention. If that's a problem, they can keep it a private repo, and not share it on HN.

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#45

Post by zem » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC

vmchale wrote: post #15

Is this a research language? I don't understand how this offers anything beyond what already exists. I'm also suspicious of the fact that it's implemented in Go. I would think that someone who knew functional programming well enough to create a new language would implement the language in Haskell or OCaml or even Standard ML. Also the type system looks pretty bad. No algebraic data types.

they are trying to build on top of the go runtime, so implementing it in go makes sense.

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#46

Post by simcop2387 » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 8:30 PM UTC

Couldn't find it easily, but what model are they using to make this dead-lock free as they advertise? I've seen a number of languages try to accomplish this same goal but usually with a huge caveat on what kinds of programs are allowed, or by randomly killing threads when a dead-lock is detected.

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#47

Post by rhencke » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

choeger wrote: post #12

But what's its type discipline? H/M polymorphism? Overloading? Subtyping? How is it evaluating? Eager? Lazy? What values are supported? Records? What flavor? Modules?

You may find the Ko Handbook useful, as much of this is addressed there:

https://kocircuit.github.io/language/

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#48

Post by Syzygies » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 8:47 PM UTC

simcop2387 wrote: post #46

Couldn't find it easily, but what model are they using to make this dead-lock free as they advertise? I've seen a number of languages try to accomplish this same goal but usually with a huge caveat on what kinds of programs are allowed, or by randomly killing threads when a dead-lock is detected.

If you understand why a purely functional language like Haskell rocks at parallelism without worrying about deadlocks, then: same answer here.

I'll agree this isn't ready yet to be the first example of functional parallelism in someone's life, but I'm pretty excited to play with this computational model.

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#49

Post by ivoras » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 8:55 PM UTC

I can't be the only one who's annoyed by language writers introducing arbitrary uncommon syntax apparently just for the sake of doing something new?

Lua's great little language but writing ~= instead of != is simply annoying. In this "Ko" language, it looks like they do returns with a colon, as in "return: x" -- why??? I won't even go into Rust picking up Perl's bad habit of looking like line noise with all the ASCII sigil usage in advanced code.

Also, any language which doesn't have a "hello world" example in its front page is doomed. Even such a wide-spread language as Python has code snippets practically first thing on its web page! This is not by accident!

Re: Ko – A concurrent, immutable, functional language

#50

Post by yiyus » Thu, Dec 06, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

nikofeyn wrote: post #38

yiyus wrote: post #2

There is not a single example in the README. I checked the step-by-step guide, but it starts with installation and documentation instructions, then imports, and I don't know yet how the language feels like. Ok, let's check that handbook then. Computation model, type system, ... Please, I just want to see a program with a dozen lines of code to see what it looks like. Of course, more extended examples with the intende…

isn't this a little demanding and entitled? for example, the submitter of this post to hacker news may not be the creator of the language and repository. so the creator is off just having some fun creating a language, with more than minimal documentation, and uploads it to github to track changes and generally make it public. then someone thinks it's interesting and posts it here, and the top comment is someone with…

I am quite sure the reason my comment is at top is not because other readers appreciate my tone (which I don't find aggressive, although I admit it could be nicer) but because of the link.