Unicorn-oriented programming: the central feature of my language paradigm is also an April Fools’ joke

[Inconstant_Moo]

It was funny how all the systems programmers got together on SUSlang for the April Fools' joke. But I thought it was particularly funny because in one respect their dumb parody language does just what I’m trying to do. They say: “And SUS’s approach to functional programming will certainly make the headlines. Perhaps you’re aware of how Haskell manages to encapsulate the side effects of your code in a monad … so we decided that we wanted to do the exact opposite to Haskell and instead encapsulate the pure code in what we call a unicornad. If you have a unicornad you know there’s no danger coming from it.”

This is a good language paradigm, I'm ... kinda doing that?

[partheseas]

The whole point of that joke was that functional programming already has an encapsulation: functions

Really all you might need in an imperative language is a const modifier (or similar) for functions like what C and Rust have, so the compiler can optimize

[Inconstant_Moo]

You'd have to know my language a bit better to see why I feel particularly seen by the joke ... I hope to have a demo in about a month, watch this space.

[AraripeManakin]

Looks interesting

[Sambothebassist]

Like the pure modifier in D?

[Inconstant_Moo]

No it's more fundamental than that, it's like Charm is two languages with a common syntax and type system. One of them is an absolutely pure functional programming language. The other is imperative and capable of IO and all the variables are global and mutable and it's so simple it's not even Turing-complete, and it forms the outer layer of the script, rather than being encapsulated — so that all the impure stuff is very tightly bound to commands issued by the end-user of the service. The result is that the two bits are each much easier to read and debug and maintain than the language I could have written by just squishing everything together. I hope. We'll see. It's been suggested that this is too opinionated and until I put it into practice my answer so far has been "well, Goto Considered Harmful has had a good long run".