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Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

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Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#41

This Soviet project developed two Russian-language PLs: Robic[1] and Rapira[2]. Robic was similar to Logo, but unlike Logo, which had only one actor - a turtle, Robik had several: a Train, an Ant, a Painter, and so on Rapira was more like SETL + Python. It was a dynamic interpreted PL with a rich set of compound data types, such as sets, records (associative arrays), and so on. Compared to the contemporary BASIC, it…

In my school we had a Logo-like PL where you controlled a kangaroo and a more complex one where you сontrolled a robot arm with an internal stack that worked on a rectangular array of items. I remember the robot blowing up when you triggered a logical error like going out of bounds or a stack over/underflow.

UPD: The PLs were called "Roo&Robby" and written by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sapir before he emigrated to the US.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#42

I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages. Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures. This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.

There'd be other interesting implications as well, socialist systems were more open to the idea of cybernetics and with a proper computer industry the Soviets might have had more room to explore it.

Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be.

Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#44

I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages. Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures. This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.

But they simply weren't able to sustain it. In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one. In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a sta…

Three more factors matter a lot, and get missed.

The first is corruption. When the Iron Curtain fell, every country behind it suffered from corruption. The Russian word for how it worked was блат, pronounced blat. When the official way of doing things doesn't work, the way that works is informal favor trading. I have a friend, who knows a friend, etc. This acts as grit in the economic system, and makes everyone less productive.

The second was the pressure to not stand out too much. One proverb is Инициатива наказуема, pronounced initsiativa nakazuema. It translates to, "Initiative is punishable."

Why? Well, imagine that you're a middle manager. It's a dog eat dog world. You know that everyone below you, wants your job. Everyone above you, knows that you want their job. You got your role by sucking up to the people above you. Those below you, got theirs by sucking up to you. You don't want your employees to be utterly incompetent - then you won't be able to look good. But you also don't want any of them to shine - then your boss might think that they should have your job. This encourages bland mediocracy. Everyone strives to be just good enough for their job, while sucking up well enough to keep it.

The result is a kind of learned incompetence. But a nation filled with this kind of incompetence, will be unable to sustain innovation.

The third is alcoholism. Russia is basically a very large, very dysfunctional, alcoholic family. It is hard to overstate how true that is. The most popular vodka at the end of the Soviet era came in 750 ml bottles, that did not have a resealable cap. Because no true Russian would leave a bottle half-full. Anyone who didn't drink, was odd. A group that got together without drinking might be suspected of plotting revolution. This is yet another drag on Russian society.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#45
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, in bulgarian in means 'thread' You can use "конец" for "end" in Bulgarian too, even though it's antiquated.

... and it has lots its meaning of end it's in the original post

Oof, true, somehow I failed to parse this part. Probably because you wrote "lots" instead of "lost".

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#46
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they simply weren't able to sustain it. In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one. In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a sta…

Three more factors matter a lot, and get missed. The first is corruption. When the Iron Curtain fell, every country behind it suffered from corruption. The Russian word for how it worked was блат, pronounced blat. When the official way of doing things doesn't work, the way that works is informal favor trading. I have a friend, who knows a friend, etc. This acts as grit in the economic system, and makes everyone less…

[deleted]

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit different. USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that. It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.

It wasn't a lack of raw brainpower or wealth; it was a structural and ideological failure of resource allocation. The USSR and the Iron Curtain bloc had a massive population and world-class scientific talent. The problem was that the Soviet system viewed independent thought and individuality as a threat, actively sabotaging its own geniuses: Persecution of Top Minds: Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Sovie…

> They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system.

It was more that the RMBK was more designed around existing Soviet manufacturing capacity, they could and did build more conventional reactor designs as well but they required enormous pressure vessels the USSR only had one factory to produce. The RBMK on the other hand is not a monolithic pressure vessel, it's a collection of hundreds of individual pressurised tubes which were much easier for the Soviet manufacturing base to produce. It was actually a clever idea on the face of it, the problem was more it had inherently dangerous behaviour in certain regimes (the infamous positive void coefficient of reactivity) and the positive scram effect wasn't known until well into their deployment. The operators were also given contradictory operating instructions which failed to highlight the safety-critical nature of certain parameters.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#48
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and it has lots its meaning of end it's in the original post

Oof, true, somehow I failed to parse this part. Probably because you wrote "lots" instead of "lost".

> "lots" instead of "lost"

indeed, my bad

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they simply weren't able to sustain it. In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one. In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a sta…

I think it's a bit different. USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that. It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.

You are assuming the interest of people making those designs were aligned with the interests of consumers. They obviously were only to a very small degree since there were almost no incentives for Soviet companies to produce anything that wasn’t complete crap. Consumers had no choice since even the crap products they produced were hardly ever available to normal people anyway.

> USSR just wasn't rich enough

To an extent by choice. They really didn’t utilize the resources they had optimally.

Re: Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

#50
post #30

By the way, there's one Cyrillic programming language still in wide use today. It's part of 1С (1S), an ERP system that's absolutely everywhere in Russia. The language itself is quite similar to Visual Basic. It's awkward to write with a regular Russian keyboard layout, but I was told that there exist special layouts just for it.

I’m curious, why is it awkward to write with a regular Russian keyboard layout? Presumably due to punctuation and not due to the Cyrillic characters?
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