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An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language

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Re: An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language

#2
It's really neat that someone is trying to make logic programming accessible, but the introduction and the first fews sections are really offputting. There are lots of highly performant new languages competing for attention, and statements like "Today I want to talk about programming. It is interesting to note that I have solved it. Yes, I solved it." will drive a lot of the potential audience away.

I recommend breaking this into two posts. One's a highly readable introduction to a new language (e.g. this post's 2nd half). The other's the author's opinions about the state of programming languages (1st half).

Well done for the technical work behind this project and the bravery for doing something about fixing problems you find in the world.

Re: An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language

#5

It's really neat that someone is trying to make logic programming accessible, but the introduction and the first fews sections are really offputting. There are lots of highly performant new languages competing for attention, and statements like "Today I want to talk about programming. It is interesting to note that I have solved it. Yes, I solved it." will drive a lot of the potential audience away. I recommend break…

The Readme file at https://github.com/mcsoto/cosmos is a nice concise introduction to the language. The blog post is more of a manifesto.

Re: An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language

#6
It looks like Oz [1] declarative variables could help implement a lot of this stuff. Essentially, its variables are pointers that can be assigned to only once. As such you can pass an unbound variable to a function and have it bound to produce a result.

You can also do "unification" between two variables, meaning that it will try to make the two variables equal to each other. Typically, one or both of the two variables hold a partial data structure - a data structure that references unbound variables - and it will binds some of these variables to make the unified variables compatible, if possible.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_%28programming_language%29

Re: An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language

#8
post #5

It's really neat that someone is trying to make logic programming accessible, but the introduction and the first fews sections are really offputting. There are lots of highly performant new languages competing for attention, and statements like "Today I want to talk about programming. It is interesting to note that I have solved it. Yes, I solved it." will drive a lot of the potential audience away. I recommend break…

The Readme file at https://github.com/mcsoto/cosmos is a nice concise introduction to the language. The blog post is more of a manifesto.

Ah right.. I read the post in isolation. Thanks for the reference.

Re: An Opinionated Treatise on Cosmos, a New Programming Language

#10
post #9

I wonder why they're called functors.

It's a pretty overloaded term. I haven't looked into the Cosmos semantics much, but since it's mentioned in the "logic programming" part of the language, I suspect it's referencing the Prolog sense of the term: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~billw/prologdict.html#functor
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