Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beads: Computer language and toolchain

beadslang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 235 posts

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#71

Post by potsandpans »

daenz wrote: post #67
jeroenvlek wrote: post #11

This seems like the brain child of one ambitious smart person that still needs to receive feedback from the outside world.

Probably, but I think that's also a little dismissive. Maybe they have received plenty of feedback but still think their ideas take precedence over that feedback. I don't think we should confuse outside-the-box thinking with thinking that hasn't received feedback.

they've received plenty of feedback from the PL community.

Beads is a fun an interesting project, but the over the top marketing language and hype is a bit silly. The author really is a rare mix of driven PL engineer and overly grandiose personally.

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#72

Post by tavoe »

A few months ago, I watched some videos by Brett Victor and decided I wanted to develop a visual programming language. That led me to https://futureofcoding.org/ and its slack channel.

There was some cool stuff happening on the server, and the admin was doing his best to elevate things, but that slack channel was also the last stop for some people before they descended into templeOS levels of madness.

Right around the time I was joining, the admin posted in the meta channel that, with a heavy heart, he had finally banned [the developer of beads, I feel weird calling him out by name]. Apparently he had been too argumentative and stubborn for the server to further tolerate.

It left a weird taste in my mouth about the future of coding slack channel. On one hand, you don't want toxic people in your community. On the other hand, the server was clearly a channel of last resort for a lot of people with a lot of crazy ideas. Kicking out one if its more prominent members to toil in solitude felt kind of gross.

Its interesting to see that, a few months after being banned, the beads project seems to be materializing.

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#73

Post by IncRnd »

This reads like a marketing webpage and is not technically coherent. What is the purpose that this langauge is intending to solve?

I used to program in a declarative langauge a few decades ago, Prolog. Heck, even makefiles are declarative. Declarative programming isn't guaranteed to be bug-free in the way the page indicates.

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#74

Post by megameter »

catblast01 wrote: post #66
gfodor wrote: post #12

Ah, youth.

Nope. The guy posts with his real name on YouTube so this is like TempleOS and the creator is non anonymous, quite active on Reddit, and not very young (as if the style of graphics wasn’t a dead giveaway, like a time machine to the early 90s). In any event I engaged with the creator before and what I can say is the conversations are entirely one-sided, in fact some of the most I have personally experienced. Will take…

While I've not interacted with the author, his Twitter and blog opines on all kinds of subjects and has the firm, authoritative tone of an older person who is not exactly ignorant but who doesn't recognize the depth of his own indoctrination, the silencing of the internal critic. He has all the answers already.

And, really, that's the only kind of person that could make something of this encompassing but simultaneously incoherent nature, I think.

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#76

Post by jrm4 »

sz4kerto wrote: post #23
jeroenvlek wrote: post #11

This seems like the brain child of one ambitious smart person that still needs to receive feedback from the outside world.

We need these kind of experiments. If you learn too much about contemporary software engineering, then it is almost certain that you'll end up with a React front-end talking to a NodeJS/Java back-end hosted on Kubernetes. Which is obviously the right thing most of the time :) but the world is richer because of these super-ambitious, super-naive experiments. Also: imagine how much has someone learned from implementing…

Exactly. This particular iteration is going to fail miserably, but the world will be better because people are at least thinking like this. I hope that this idea happens, somehow.

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#77

Post by discardable_dan »

kortex wrote: post #48

- promises far fewer bugs - promises to replace entire stack - ...and Excel - "declarative languages have almost no bugs" - built-in database Yeah color me skeptical. I love experiments, but I prefer those that under-promise and over-deliver. People have been promising unification languages since there were only two languages. People have been promising cross-platform since there were two platforms. And people have b…

The thing that really bothered me was the FizzBuzz example [0]. The core logic is:

  cell
  //  this routine will be called 100 times, and the implied block variable
  //  b will hold values, like the sequence number b.cell_seq
  var ss : str
  case mod(b.cell_seq, 15)
  | 0
   ss = "FizzBuzz"
   draw_rect(fill:LIGHT_SKY_BLUE)
  | 3, 6, 9, 12
   ss = "Fizz"
   draw_rect(fill:LIGHT_GREEN)  
  | 5, 10
   ss = "Buzz"
   draw_rect(fill:YELLOW)
  else
   ss = to_str(b.cell_seq)
   draw_rect(fill:ALICE_BLUE)

  //  we just set the string in the case statement above
  draw_str(ss, size:0.7, color:BLACK)  

  //  if this is the selected cell, highlight with a red frame
  if b.cell_seq == my_state.selected
   draw_rect(thick:3 pt, pos:0.7, color:CRIMSON, corner:2 pt)
The entire point of FizzBuzz, as a programming practice, is to ensure the programmer does not try to write this exact code: you check mod 3 and print Fizz, mod 5 and print Buzz. This "solution" makes me worry the language itself will impede the simple solutions.

0. https://github.com/magicmouse/beads-examples/blob/master/Exa...

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#78

Post by maciejfiedler »

IncRnd wrote: post #73

This reads like a marketing webpage and is not technically coherent. What is the purpose that this langauge is intending to solve? I used to program in a declarative langauge a few decades ago, Prolog. Heck, even makefiles are declarative. Declarative programming isn't guaranteed to be bug-free in the way the page indicates.

HTML is the only bug-free language

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#79

Post by ModernMech »

blacktriangle wrote: post #64
megameter wrote: post #56

I like it, but also recoil at the thought of using it. And I think that's a "professional programmer's instinct" talking, saying that I shouldn't settle for this one large dependency that boasts about being the future and has made room for so many little batteries-included features, I should be a big boy and use the most powerful library for every task...in JavaScript, a language that was, mind, designed in a few day…

I have the exact same reaction. You never want to shit on somebody's ambition, after all they might be a revolutionary, but at the same time the whole batteries-included thing is just setup to fail. You have an embedded graph database? Why? This is just a symptom of developers general disrespect for the depth and complexity of databases. There's a reason we have so many different different databases, those difference…

> You have an embedded graph database? Why? This is just a symptom of developers general disrespect for the depth and complexity of databases.

I disagree. This is a recognition of the fact that the line between database, programming language, and operating system is very blurry. It's not that the programming language has a graph database tacked on, it's that the language is a database and leverages that fact to provide features impossible or hard to come by in more conventional languages (e.g. transactional updates, time travel debugging, what-if scenarios, etc.). Still, nothing would prevent you from using whatever database you want in the usual way.

Re: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

#80

Post by maciejfiedler »

nicaragua wrote: post #60
scoopertrooper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sick of this kind of cynicism on HN. I'll have you know that I've already managed to replace my car with Beads.

I replaced my computer with beads. Girlfriend loves them.

beads is girlfriend
Post reply on HN