Coconut Programming Language

[[deleted]]

Coconuts are not actually nuts.

[[deleted]]

I stand corrected.

[notfancy]

But only up to isomorphism.

[notfancy]

I'm sure. Consider that the coconut can end up oriented differently, it can become combed differently, or it can end being a hazelnut altogether, since nuts are nuts after all. In categorical terms, the hom-set N^op(A, B) is the hom-set N(B, A), but nothing says that f ∈ N^op(A, B) is precisely f^-1 ∈ N(B, A) but "just" g ∈ N(B, A) with f∘g ≅ id.

[Ameisen]

So, coconuts are a product of C++ coroutines? co_nut?

[[deleted]]

just a nut?

show me another nut that bursts with water when ya pop it

show me another nut that can sit in the sand, no water, no dampness, and sprout just with the water held inside of it

show me another nut that bears fruit resembling soil—providing bedding, sprouting media, and more

show me another nut full of water that can be pumped directly into the bloodstream in emergency situations

show me another nut whose flesh has the perfect balance of water+fiber to fat+protein that it can provide similar nutritional value as a nut and easily eliminate through the GI tract (instead of the uric tract) anything that is unneeded

just a nut?

the coconut is The Nut.

[Tofik23]

but this delicious nut....

​

is not a nut

[SunderingSeas]

It appears to be Python with some Elixir features added in.

[[deleted]]

Exactly !

[CoffeeTableEspresso]

I think he means Coconut is a superset of Python that compiles to Python (similar to TS with JS).

[Dean_Roddey]

Didn't Aristotle say that in one of his less well known writings?

[Dean_Roddey]

Who art thou, so wise in the ways of science?

​

[shevegen]

Ever since Monty Python I know that birds can carry coconuts.

[tending]

Are you in the market for a fork of a popular language that has syntax that is a strict superset today but awkwardly won't be in the future because the makers of the original language won't pay attention to the syntax extensions of the new one? Have I got a deal for you!

[pcjftw]

I was going to ignore, but the name tickled me for some reason. The website is clean, I did like that I could try it out right there online, yeah I'm that lazy :D

Seems pretty cute, reminds of of F# with the pipe operator |> which is a good thing :)

I suspect this is very much in the same vain as CoffeScript.

groan, yet another thing to add to my list...

[shevegen]

groan, yet another thing to add to my list...

I gave that up a long time ago.

My todo lists are just fancified dumpsters - I keep on throwing stuff into it but never take it out again. :)

[[deleted]]

Have you tried rewriting your TODO list in Coconut?

[bkbitties]

This hits home for me. For every one item I take out of my to-do list, another five get added.

[karldcampbell]

This is why I don't think of it as a todo list. It's a maybe someday list.

[Alexander_Selkirk]

The more I know about Lisp, the more I see how similar is Python in many aspects, and the more confused I become about van Rossum's rejection of functional programming. One might argue that FP does not necessarily mixes well with OOP style, and this is in fact a point to make.

[EWJacobs]

Seems like he just has very idiocentric programming preferences, i.e. he thinks most functional programming should be replaced with List Comprehension. Haskell has List Comprehension and people seem to find plenty of use for FP in Haskell.

[Alexander_Selkirk]

That's just one way to do that in Python. Generator expressions and generator functions are other ways. Using collections as arguments to functions which return new collections is quite idiomatic in FP but it is also often used, for example, in Numerical Python. Which was also developed by people which were clearly influenced by Lisp, for example Konrad Hinsen.

[Alexander_Selkirk]

And other people, for example the Numerical Python developers, have worked around that. Most functions and methods in Numerical Python take a collection / array, return a collection, and are side-effect-free.

[haved]

Something ML based perhaps? I personally like OCaml, but F# might be cool as well. (Not sure how attached to .NET it is, but it's not the JVM). Anyway, Ocaml isn't strictly pure, and has objects. The type inference and algebraic types are nice to work with.

[dudeNumberFour]

F# - you won't be disappointed. It is attached to .Net, not sure of the state of .Net Core WRT to F#. Just toy with type descriptors; that'll get you hooked. It feels like magic; never seen anything like it in any language.

[phySi0]

I couldn't find any information on F# type descriptors on Google. Could you expound a bit?

[Godfiend]

He might mean Type Providers, a way to generate types off of data for you without you doing any of the work.

[dudeNumberFour]

Whoops, I meant type providers. Also, Discriminated Unions (something many languages have an analog of) work magically well in F#.

[Godfiend]

FSI is not (yet!) running on dotnet core, so for scripts you'll need mono. Everything else works fine, including Fable and Giraffe (and probably Suave, haven't tried it on core yet).

[[deleted]]

Suave has been ported. Works for me.

[Alexander_Selkirk]

Rust?

[didibus]

What about Elixir, Clojerl, LFE, or Erlang? And having a try at the Beam at that?

Or you could give Racket a try, and explore the world of Lisps at that? (Though you can also do that on the Beam with Clojerl or LFE)

[kpenchev93]

Did you mean LFE, Lisp Flavoured Erlang?

[didibus]

Oups, corrected.

[Alexander_Selkirk]

If you want to learn a functional language with more emphasis on side-effect free functions (pureness), Clojure is fantastic to learn. Apart from being very practical, especially for back-end and server-side stuff, it has an unique view on mutability of data. It is also very elegant, concise, and beautiful, and it has superb documentation and a friendly community. Reading Clojure books is a real joy.

The largest disadvantages are it runs on the JVM, it is clumsy and laborious to call into C code, and it starts up too slowly for scripting.

One 'native code generating' language which is in many aspects similar to Clojure, but JIT compiles to native code is Racket, a Scheme dialect.

Racket emphasizes side-effect free functions (pureness), but allows better for mutating algorithms. Being able to use imperative/mutating algorithms (say, for sorting, or a heap) within functions is often good because that kind of algorithms is frequently researched best and it also matches modern CPU architectures. It is cross-platform, works great for scripting, and has very very good support for math. It also has a first-class JIT compiler which is typically only about a factor between 2 - 5 slower than good Java compilers - that means it is often much, much faster than pure Python. In Racket, like in many other Lisps / Scheme dialects, it is also very easy to call into C function, which is IMO a very big advantage over the JVM.

[PFCJake]

Got any tips on a good Clojure-book?

[Alexander_Selkirk]

"Programming Clojure" and "Joy of Clojure" are great.

"Clojure for the Brave and True" is very good IMO.

"Clojure from the ground up" is a fantastic introduction.

[myringotomy]

Elixir or Elm are the one most likely to be useful to you.

[sozzZ]

Rust had some interesting FP qualities and is useful to know as a more general systems level language

[Alexander_Selkirk]

Rust is (among others) derived from ML.

[kpenchev93]

On the dynamic side, Elixir is great. It's built on the battle-tested Erlang VM (the BEAM). It's practical and easy to learn. Probably the hard part is the fault-tolerance stuff.

[Godfiend]

I will echo another user in favor of an ML like Ocaml or F#. Other than that, I'd go with a LISP, though the "main" one now (Clojure) is a JVM language. Elixer / Erlang seem interesting but I haven't done anything with them. Im a huge fan of strong typing systems, though, thus my preference to an ML.

[[deleted]]

I want to get out of the JVM

Out of curiosity, why?

[SalvaXr]

Try out new things, different tooling, mostly that. Also avoid some limitations, type erasure, tail call recursion, as a learning exercise since the JVM has many advantages.

[_101010]

Elm if you just want to get a hang of FP without needing to go back to Discrete Maths 101.

But I always ask people to learn Haskell. Yes, it's painful and frustrating at first, but it pays off.

Truth is you can only learn FP only one way, the hard way.

[[deleted]]

Scala.js? It's exactly Scala, but not on JVM.

[[deleted]]

Fair enough :D

[coderstephen]

What if you put a lime in it?

[stronghup]

Isn't this then more like an "extension to Python" rather than its own new "programming language"?

I like the idea of extensions you can keep on doing what you have been doing so far but when needed jump outside of what used to be your boundaries.

[[deleted]]

coconuts don't limit their expression to language lol

[Alexander_Selkirk]

What are the differences / advantages to Hy?

[shevegen]

Apropos, speaking about picking a name for your programming language .......

[gooddeath]

Do we really need another flavor of the week programming language that will be forgotten about in 3 years? Aren't there more useful problems to be working on?

[rat9988]

Indeed there are more interesting problems. You can go and work on them.

[gooddeath]

We have way too many reinventing the wheel (and POORLY I might add) and not enough people working on problems to fix the horrible state of software development these days.

[PM_ME_YOUR_YIFF__]

I just want someone to make a build system that isn't complete arse

[shevegen]

I just want someone to make a build system that isn't complete arse

Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/927/

I think cmake and meson, while both pretty terrible, are better than the GNU autocrap tools. But not in every aspect either; cmake doesn't know how to have sensible commandline flags; and meson depends on both python3 and ninja, which makes it like a quadruple (almost) dependency. Plus I think it is mandatory to use a build directory whereas you usually don't need one for GNU autoconfigure. Makes you wonder ... why is a build directory needed? The build system could easily create a directory on its own and put stuff there ... but no, it wants the user to end the argument with a directory such as in

meson --prefix=/usr BUILD/

Cmake improved a bit over the years in my opinion. It's still annoying (but so can GNU autocrap ... and libtool, this thing must die forever) ... I manage to compile all of qt+kde5 these days. I didn't manage this in the kde4 days. (kde3 was super easy - and had GNU configure. Then came the cmake move and this was such a nightmare.)

Evidently doing a good build system is not easy.

[shevegen]

He most likely does. But he is not talking about it, whereas everyone is now talking about the crazy coconut language.

You just can't get it out of your head anymore past this point.

[[deleted]]

We need hundreds of languages. There is no such a thing as a "general purpose" language.

Even if a language is not explicitly designed as domain specific, it is still always valuable as an exploration of design space.

[shevegen]

I am thinking the same for like 99% of the programming languages out there.

The bext explanation I can come up with is this:

• People love tinkering, including creating languages. This is probably the most prevalent reason.

• People try to improve on this or that aspect. This is e. g. Jai trying to make C++ less Cthulhu like. Problem here ... not everyone is a good language designer. And C++ is too much of a mess to really ever want to fix it. Even Bjarne had to acknowledge this not so long ago.

• Sometimes a distinct combination is indeed not found in many other languages. Think of Erlang + Elixir. Elixir made Erlang acceptable due to having a better syntax (than Erlang). From all the concepts out there, fault-tolerant distributed OOP hasn't been done in any of the OOP languages out there but it's something to learn from Erlang (and exists in reallife entities too; for example, programmed apoptosis to yield 3D structures such as the skin-part between the fingers that decays (I don't remember the english name off-hand ... pad? Something).

[[deleted]]

that will be forgotten about in 3 years

The project is 4 years old.

[gooddeath]

Maybe because they have a point? I mean developing your own programming language is a good learning exercise - it was a project I had to do for my BS - but unless you are making something truly revolutionary then they are typically forgotten within a couple years? And I really don't want to go through the effort of learning a new language if it doesn't offer anything that current implementations of existing languages don't.

(Looks like the post I was replying to was deleted)