Dada, an experimental new programming language • Hacker News Board

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#91

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:27 PM UTC

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #17

baq wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you want something like 'debug_msg()' for this. 'print()' should be async because it does IO. In the real world most likely you'd see the output once you yield.

Huh, typically print is the debug message function vs explicitly writing to stdout

In rust, the common debug message function would be log::info! or log::debug!, with two lines of setup to make logs print to stderr. Or for something more ad-hock, there's dbg! (which adds context what you are printing, and doesn't care about your logging config). Not that people don't use print for the purpose, but it's basically never the best choice. I assume Dada is conceived with the same mindset.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#92

Post by ericyd » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

thesz wrote: post #85

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…

> actually creating a working language is a big overhead Languages, with first class values, pattern matching, rich types, type inference and even fancy RTS, often can be embedded in Haskell. For one example, it is very much possible to embed into Haskell a Rust-like language, even with borrow checking (which is type-checking time environment handling, much like linear logic). See [1], [2] and [3]. [1] http://blog.si…

Are you suggesting that creating a new programming language from scratch is a trivial exercise? If yes, wow. If no, I think the intention of your comment could be more clear, particularly regarding the quote you took from the original comment.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#93

Post by sanderjd » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:30 PM UTC

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…

In college, my programming languages class used a language called "Mystery" (I believe created by my professor), which was configurable. Assignments would be like "write some test programs to figure out whether the language is configured to use pass-by-value or pass-by-reference". And there were a bunch of other knobs that could be turned, and in each case, the idea was that we could figure out the knob's setting by writing programs and seeing what they did.

I loved this, both as a teaching aid, and as an eye-opener that programming languages are just an accumulation of choices with different trade-offs that can all go different ways and result in something that works, perhaps a bit better or perhaps worse, or perhaps just a bit more toward or away from one's own personal taste.

This is sort of the lisp idea of "create the language that is natural to write the application in, then write the application". Or Ruby's take on that idea, with more syntax than lisp but flexible and "human" enough to be DSL-ish.

But somewhat to my sadness, as I've progressed in my career, I've realized that the flip side of this is that, if you're building something big it will require lots of people and all those people will have different experiences and personal preferences, so just picking one standard thing and one standard set of defaults and sticking with that is the way to go. It reduces cognitive overhead and debate and widens the pool of people who can contribute to your effort.

But for personal projects, I still love this idea of thought experimentation around the different ways languages and programming environments could work!

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#94

Post by dewbrite » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:31 PM UTC

amw-zero wrote: post #73

gary17the wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do not want to mess with Rust borrow checker, you do not really need a garbage collector: you can rely on Rust reference counting. Use 1.) Rust reference-counted smart pointers[1] for shareable immutable references and 2.) Rust internal mutability[2] for non-shareable mutable references checked at runtime instead of compile time. Effectively, you will be writing kind of verbose Golang with Rust's expressivenes…

A language has a paved road, and when you go off of that road you are key with extreme annoyance and friction every step of the way. You’re telling people to just ignore the paved road of Rust, which is bad advice.

I strongly disagree that smart pointers are "off the paved road". I don't even care to make specific arguments against that notion, it's just a terrible take.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#95

Post by diggan » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:31 PM UTC

Rucadi wrote: post #11

no upfront types, for me this is unusable sadly

Literally every single program you ever created has needed types?

I've probably written 100s of tiny little utility programs that are a couple of lines at most, and wouldn't need types for any of those, it would just add extra verbosity for no gain.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#96

Post by nu11ptr » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

I like the idea, but please no "async/await". In a higher level language green threads like Go has are the correct answer IMO (and I'm not a Go fan, but I feel they got this part right).

Gradual typing is interesting, but I wonder if necessary. Static typing doesn't have to feel like a burden and could make it hard to reason about performance. I think more type inference would be better than gradually typed (like OCaml/ML).

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#97

Post by benrutter » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #86

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…

Runtime would be nice, but ... that's basically what Tokio and the other async frameworks are. What's needed is better/more runtime(s), better support for eliding stuff based on the runtime, etc. It seems very hard to pick a good 'number' (JS's is actually a double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 float, which almost never feels right).

Yes, that's true - "number" is probably more broad than I'd really want. That said, python's "int", "float" and "decimal" options (although decimal isn't really first class in the same way the otherse are) feels like a nice balance. But again, its interesting the way even that is probably a bias towards the type of problems I work with vs other people who want more specification.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#98

Post by sanderjd » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

happens wrote: post #25

It's weird, I want pretty much the exact opposite of this: a language with the expressive type system and syntax of rust, but with a garbage collector and a runtime at the cost performance. Basically go, but with rusts type system. I'm aware that there are a few languages that come close to this (crystal iirc), but in the end it's adoption and the ecosystem that keeps me from using them.

Totally agree! But I think it's a "both and" rather than an "either or" situation. I can see why people are interested in the experiment in this article, and I think your and my interest in the other direction also makes sense.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#99

Post by pas » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

wtetzner wrote: post #87

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.

> If my goal as a programmer is to simply print to the console, why should I add care about the await? Because that isn't ever anyone's actual goal? Optimizing a language design for "Hello World" doesn't seem like a particularly useful decision.

sure, but it seems useful to be able to opt-in/opt-out of async easily. ie.

if I want a short/simple program it would be cool to put a stanza on the top of the file to auto-await all futures.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#100

Post by sanderjd » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 1:34 PM UTC

overstay8930 wrote: post #39

happens wrote: post #25

It's weird, I want pretty much the exact opposite of this: a language with the expressive type system and syntax of rust, but with a garbage collector and a runtime at the cost performance. Basically go, but with rusts type system. I'm aware that there are a few languages that come close to this (crystal iirc), but in the end it's adoption and the ecosystem that keeps me from using them.

You have awoken the ocaml gang

Yeah, ocaml is awesome! Frankly, if it had a more familiar syntax but the same semantics, I think its popularity would have exploded in the last 15 years. It's silly, but syntax is the first thing people see, and it is only human to form judgments during those moments of first contact.