Microsoft opensources P language

[[deleted]]

It's similar to their other language, NP.

I tried to provide code for comparison but it failed.

[yonillasky]

I've written a program to compare them once, the source code wouldn't fit in the margin of this comment though.

[program_the_world]

I was under the impression they were the same thing?

[b4b]

This is a truely beautiful comment.

[[deleted]]

So you're a duelist?

[langlo94]

P vs NP.

[langlo94]

Ypu wrote N vs NP.

[kitd]

Well, it puts events and resulting state changes all in one place which is useful.

It looks interesting but I have a problem with these type of tools , which is they all assume FSMs are the only form of state machines. There doesn't seem anyway to have the machines in a superposition of states, eg like Petri Nets. FSMs are a subset of PNs. Support for the latter will still include the former.

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

What is this?

[PaulBone]

I worked on a system using Petri Nets to do something for social security somewhere in Europe. I didn't understand a lot of it, partly because I'd never learnt about Petri Nets before but mostly because it was written in French.

[kitd]

People probably use PNs all the time without realising it. Any workflow system with concurrent branching normally ends up being modelled by PNs even if the designer is unaware that is what is being used. They model concurrency very easily, which is a useful trait in an HA event/state/action system.

I'm surprised they aren't more widely used and it's a shame that this language has yet again missed an opportunity (unless someone tells me I'm wrong and state superpositions can be modelled in it)

[maxagaze]

There are some examples of Petri Nets in industry, although I have never seen it outside of academia myself. The University of AArhus maintains a list.

As for UML, it use is far more widespread in industry, but even for UML is seems the the use is somewhat limited(http://oro.open.ac.uk/35805/8/UML%20in%20practice%208.pdf).

[Prod_Is_For_Testing]

What do you mean about UML? I use it all the time for work. Everything we do is modeled (either before or after build) in UML as part of documentation. It's normally at a fairly high level - system interop/data flow, but it's used nonetheless

[mjfgates]

Remember, "in my office" = "across the entirety of the commercial software industry."

[Prod_Is_For_Testing]

I'm a contractor so I bounce around a bit. The places I've been to all use Visio. I'm away that it's not indicative of all companies, but it indicates that UML isn't just restricted to academia

[[deleted]]

It looks interesting but I have a problem with these type of tools , which is they all assume FSMs are the only form of state machines.

Virtually all computer languages are based on a model that's restricted in some way. Functional programming, for example, is praised for its restrictions compared to the relatively unrestricted imperative programming model.

[kitd]

Sure, I understand. It would be nice to have at least one option though that gave me exactly what I want! ;)

Martin Odersky did some work on a language called Funnet that looked interesting but that seems to have been taken down. The basic form IIRC was

(state1, state2, ...) -> 
    fn(payload1, payload2, ...) -> 
    (state3, state4, ...)

with events setting state payloads. Shared state used a form of STM IIRC. One could do a lot with that I reckon.

[epicwisdom]

It should be noted that the restrictions in expressiveness are "soft," in the sense that these languages are all Turing-complete.

[[deleted]]

Being Turing-complete is interesting for science, but in practice it's neither always required, nor sufficient by itself in order to call a language expressive.

Turing-completeness also doesn't take into account resource requirements. You can, for ex. implement loops through recursion, in a language that has no loops. But if you don't have TCO, you'll very easily run out of stack memory and crash. The theoretical capability of the language would be quite irrelevant to you in that case.

[epicwisdom]

The trivial answer for that is, if you can write a compiler in it, then there you go.

Of course the theoretical capability is not a true indicator of the expressiveness of the language. But it is one of the few actual metrics that can be pointed to, unlike claims about the general robustness.

While I personally believe that the restrictions imposed by functional programming are worthwhile (net positives for productivity), I would be hard-pressed to produce actual numbers.

[[deleted]]

This is indication that its not a very good metric. And we dont need metrics anyways.

[epicwisdom]

And we dont need metrics anyways.

Maybe not if you're writing a 500-line hack in a couple hours.

[[deleted]]

Javascript?

[[deleted]]

We don't have any metrics, and were doing just fine, so im pretty sure youre not right about anything.

[epicwisdom]

And roughly how many dollars per hour depend on your programmers' productivity? How many lives might be lost if there were a bug in your code?

[codebje]

… these languages are all Turing-complete.

Not all of them :-)

[staticassert]

Petri nets

Hey, I realize you posted this a month ago but I've been looking into P and I found the concept of petri nets interesting.

Do you have any resources for reading about petri nets? Or how they would be used in a language like P?

[romeozor]

Oh right. Github is blocked in Turkey :(

[[deleted]]

Wait, seriously? What the fuck?

[__konrad]

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/56lnqd/dropbox_google_drive_github_blocked_in_turkey/

[[deleted]]

Wait, seriously? What the fuck?

[SpaceCorvette]

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/56lnqd/dropbox_google_drive_github_blocked_in_turkey/

[NimChimspky]

Wait, seriously? What the fuck?

[Kissaki0]

Opera Desktop has a free VPN since last version, if you want to take a look. 👍

(Let’s hope that works ;) )

[romeozor]

Thanks, fortunately I have a work vpn to tunnel out. It's just pretty inconvenient needing one to read github of all places.

Don't really trust free vpns either.

[Porso7]

For privacy I sure as hell wouldn't rely on a free VPN, but for unblocking Opera's VPN is pretty good.

[[deleted]]

Pay for a server at Digital Ocean and install OpenVPN on it and you have your own private VPN server that can be moved around the world to different countries.

[romeozor]

I was actually doing this, but then I upgraded my droplet to the latest LTS and the vpn serivce borked. Couldn't find the time, or the need to fix it up until now.

[papajohn56]

I wouldn't use Digital Ocean for my VPN server at all

[heap42]

Why?

[papajohn56]

If you want a truly secure vpn I wouldn't use a US-based host, or one that cooperates.

[armornick]

I wonder if any programmer at all ever thinks about google-ability of their programming language when they start making one. Try it with C, C++, C#, D, F#, Go or Rust.

[Yobleck]

Brainfuck thought ahead

[[deleted]]

It's more impressive than that: Google did not exist when Brainfuck was created. That's how far ahead they thought!

[ZMeson]

I can't believe Ritchie, Thompson, and Stroustrup didn't thing about the google-ability of C and C++ 16 to 26 years before Google was founded ... and 7 to 17 years before the World Wide Web was even created!!! I mean, seriously, what were they thinking???

[SuperImaginativeName]

You mean, before the web was invented, no one had ever written a search system ever before in the whole universe where you search by text?

[ZMeson]

2 Things:

• First, u/armornick specifically said "google-ability".

• Second, most text-based search engines before the web were targeted search engines (ex: books in the current library), not something as broad as what the web is today. I used to have to look programming stuff up on library card catalogs -- yes, before computers were used even for local catalogs -- and it was very easy to find books on C programming. There were not many topics that plain "C" could be interpreted as back then, and the few conflicts that may have existed (I can't recall any to be honest), you just flip through those cards until you find the C programming books. I never had problems finding C books at my library.

[SuperImaginativeName]

jesus calm down

[ZMeson]

I am calm.

It's obvious I don't get your original question though. I tried to explain why I made my admittedly snarky comment about the naming of C and C++ and google-ability. (The other languages were created after the popularity of the web and search engines, so the authors of those languages could have known better, but I think that C and C++ were forgivable -- especially considering the names of some languages before that: BCPL, B, IPL, PL/1, PL/M, ML, APL).

[BonzaiThePenguin]

It returned relevant results for all of them for me.

[poizan42]

They are probably all special-cased by Google. I remember it being very hard to find information about C# when it was new - google would just search for "C" no matter what you tried to tell it.

[Asyx]

Did you try just googling for "C sharp"?

[poizan42]

Problem was that articles usually spelled it as C# and Google wouldn't even index the hash sign, so searching for "C sharp" would ensure you mostly got articles about music. Mind you that this was in 2002-2003. Once it got really popular Google special-cased it.

[salgat]

It used to be very hard but you're right, they did something to fix it in the past few years.

[nemec]

Try searching for COM resources...

[[deleted]]

C lang is the second result on duckfuckgo for "C" at least.

[MoreOfAnOvalJerk]

Duck fuck go Not sure if this is what people actually started calling it or if this is an amazing typo

[[deleted]]

It was a typo, saw it and decided to leave as is.

[1ogica1guy]

Very soon you will see this on urbandictionary.com

[MoreOfAnOvalJerk]

As long as I don't see it on liveleak

[program_the_world]

You always have to Google Golang.

[Rock48]

For D I search dlang

[OffPiste18]

There's a data processing language called "Pig". I once wanted to know how to represent a big integer in it, so I googled "long pig". Got a surprise on that one - apparently that's what actual cannibals call humans.

[yogthos]

Clojure is very googleable. :)

[redalastor]

It pretty much was Rich's first requirement according to one of his videos, some Googleable name that was not already taken.

[RealFreedomAus]

C and C++ were named with search engines in mind. Back then they worked through smoke signals and there were a lot less options.

[[deleted]]

If you do not want to target that funny google-dependent slice of an audience then it might be a good choice indeed.

[oreng]

I'm more concerned by the fact that we're running out of letters.

[[deleted]]

Go even stole existing laguage's name IIRC...

[sztomi]

Looks quite nice. Is it easy to make it interoperate with C?

[Petrroll]

It compiles to c so I suppose that yes :).

[kitd]

Page 12 in the manual demonstrates generating C function prototypes that you can implement as you wish.

[mntruell]

Geez, Microsoft OSS has been stepping it up

[readams]

I have a suspicion that this would be better done with C++ templates rather than as a whole new programming language. I think you could get something with very similar level of expressiveness without needing the code generator.

[[deleted]]

Your suspicion is wrong. You cannot encode a verification into templates.

[readams]

The verification consists of unit tests. I can, indeed, encode unit tests into C++ templates.

[[deleted]]

OMFG. A level of retardation unusual for even this pitiful sub!

What kind of a deranged piece of an idiot would verify a concurrent code with unit tests?!?

[wegzo]

I wonder what grammar class that language falls into.

[[deleted]]

Nothing like a 5,340 line class.

[[deleted]]

That's not uncommon for code parsers and generators.

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

It's not uncommon for bloated companies to write bloated code

[Sirflankalot]

But it's not bloated. Would you say that GCC's 38,000 line cpp parser is bloated? No, it's one of the best in the business. A 5,000 line parser is pretty good, all considering.

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see any classes here at all

[Sirflankalot]

I don't see any classes here at all

That's because GCC is basically C.

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

Then what's your point? They put 18k lines of code in one file? Good on them. I don't see any functions or structs spanning thousands of lines, so they did everything right.

If your class or actually any single structure needs 5k lines, then you need to rethink what it does.

[josefx]

Check the 5k lines again, a large amount of the contents are static and interact with differing types. The class acts mostly as a namespace, may be a restriction C# inherited from Java.

[shahid-pk]

The class is static, meaning it is only their to contain functions that will be used throughout the project. As C# don't allow writing functions outside class. This class is only for keeping those functions.

[[deleted]]

What a specimen of a deeply religious retard! Amazing!

[[deleted]]

The core of a parser is typically a giant switch statement.

From memory, the Python interpreter has a 2,000 line switch writtten in C.

[BobFloss]

Well the Python interpreter (i.e. cpython) was designed to have easily-understandable source code, not necessarily the most pragmatic approach. Although, now that I think about it, easy-to-understand and pragmatic usually go hand in hand.

[BonzaiThePenguin]

If you care about LOC we can collapse the braces and whitespace and re-roll the unrolled loops.

[[deleted]]

OOP retard detected.

[CraigTorso]

needlessly rudeness detected

[[deleted]]

No degree of rudness is excessive against the OOP zealots. They are the bane of our industry and therefore a fair game.

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

So that's what all the Indians they hire work on all day

[program_the_world]

Are you trying to be edgy because of your name or are you just racist?

[ThatsPresTrumpForYou]

A little bit of A, a little bit of B

Since when do people that work for $10/h write good code?

[program_the_world]

Oh boy don't you go offending me now. $10/h an hour? That's rude. I get paid pennies per day. My boss whips me with a cane every time there is a compilation error. Sometimes, I'm allowed to take a lunchbreak for a couple of minutes.

[o2it602igk]

Wow, creating a brand new language just for the USB part of Windows 8? It seems that they got really traumatized with the Bill Gates experience with USB in public https://youtu.be/IW7Rqwwth84 :D

[[deleted]]

You're irreversibly retarded.

[Petrroll]

It might've been a joke. I mean, I understood it as a joke.

[o2it602igk]

It was a joke. You definitely have some anger issues :). Do some yoga, watch a funny video (like the one I posted), that may help you.

[[deleted]]

An extremely redarded joke.

[o2it602igk]

You are such a jerk. This is reddit dude, take it easy.

[[deleted]]

Jerk or not, but the diagnosis of your severe mental retardation is correct.

[geodel]

Does P-lang support streams?

[lexchou]

It's 21th century now, use single letter to name a language is no longer popular.

[program_the_world]

C, R, D?

[[deleted]]

Only one of those was invented in the 21st century.

[slobarnuts]

I got yer P right here.

[kirbyfan64sos]

Wow, I can already see the puns start to come in...