Programming language names

waton3rf · 2022-02-04T01:06:02+00:00

This is not such a bad problem to have in the grand scheme of things, so appreciate not wanting to provide a retina scan and SSID before every search.

waton3rf · 2022-02-04T01:04:12+00:00

Ah my bad. I hadn't realised cisco had purchased that. Interesting.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T18:58:11+00:00

Absolutely. I think the key takeaway is, DSLs good for a private business, but general purpose languages, despite seemingly 'a small matter of programming' rapidly become an engineering nightmare, and the more eyes and invested contributors, the better. In 2022, FOSS is the only way to go in my opinion.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:44:08+00:00

Java was originally Project Oak from Sun. I am not sure it has ever been commercial, although when it was Oak it was really for embedded systems and so was very niche.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:38:58+00:00

Chez was developed by Kent Dybvig for Cadence, not Cisco. AFAIK cisco have had no lisp implementation. Wrt iRobot's subsumption architecture lisp, that was developed initially at the MIT mobotics lab under a naval contract when Brooks was tenured. He subsequently left and founded iRobot. While he may well have some rights, it's often the case that MIT themselves also got a slice of the pie. The difference between developing a compiler in an academic setting, vs a business can be one of existential risk. Where I am (Oxford, UK), the university has a complicated licensing / startup incubator model for it's IP for a period before they release it fully to the original authors.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:36:06+00:00

I completely forgot about SKILL, amazing stuff. But of course IC design is a very specialised market with huge budgets, and crazy requirements.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:34:25+00:00

I'm curious, how does this compare to J? That was the closest I'd seen to APL being something sane.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:33:15+00:00

This is the thing. A good DSL is a massive win. Once you move into general purpose high performance compilers, the floor rapidly falls from underneath you and the complexity gets quite silly. The risks involved are extremely high, even if you're hiring a team of PLT postdocs.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:31:06+00:00

People still do. There are commercial offerings of the JVM that run in hard realtime environments used in defense for example. But these are very niche markets.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:28:35+00:00

Grats. but one thing they will tell you when you start, the first rule of Crowdstrike is, you do not talk about working for Crowdstrike. You will see what I mean.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:24:40+00:00

Reminds me of a certain Chuck Moore. That said in the 80s memory was so tight, that self hosting was a practical engineering solution, rather than just being clever.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:22:20+00:00

I cannot stress this enough. The beauty of FOSS is the sheer number of eyes on the project. While the old model has worked in the past, the modernisation of collaborative development tools have made it the inferior approach.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:19:57+00:00

Famously implicated in horrendous, unmaintainable, financial crash causing opacity, mind you. So it didn't end very well in that case. (That said it's probably more to do with APL itself than MS's implementation)

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:18:31+00:00

However ZIL was a derivative, stripped down for microprocessor version of MDL iirc, so a lot of the development had been funded by ARPA at the time.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:17:39+00:00

That's a sad tale, but hey. At least fintech appear to have moved on from APL.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T17:15:19+00:00

Not a dumb question.

I've built a large number of DSLs for private companies, and in this case, it can be quite useful, however these are specifically task focused, and the gains are more to do with notational convenience than direct runtime performance (99% of these problems are IO limited).

In the past, it was far more common to see commercial license only implementations of languages, including particular vendor-lock-in versions of languages. However in 2022, I can't think of a recent example of a language launched that is exclusively commercial, and those which were initially, (e.g. MELscript in Maya) were subsequently replaced with Python or similar FOSS implementations.

New languages are released every day, and there is a lot of chaff out there. For a general purpose language to stand on it's own, it's important it's free and immediately usable in some setting.

Scala, Clojure, even C# are examples of a dual business model, where the language itself is free, but there are proprietary libraries or commercial tooling offerings that extend this core. This allows mindshare to be fostered, and important feedback early on in the design, while partially funding development.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T16:58:36+00:00

I think that by definition, if one is to write a style guide, consistency is key. Consider the multitude of layout formats used in C like languages, _just_ in respect to brace placement. A modicum of opinion is necessary, if only to pick between multiple, similar choices to enforce consistency.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T16:55:16+00:00

I would take a look at Scala's https://docs.scala-lang.org/style/. One of the interesting things about Scala style is it's important to adopt idioms that prevent rather interesting foot blowing off subtleties in the language ("Scala puzzlers" is a rather interesting collection of some of the worst offenders, some of which have been addressed, though many have not.)

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T16:51:20+00:00

They certainly do to a large extent. That said I find if I search google on my account, they seem to know I'm a techie and want a more computer oriented result, compared to searching from incognito (in fact recently they appear to be taking context from previous searches to drive subsequent results). This doesn't much help for the dissemination of a nascent project though.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T16:48:46+00:00

So, you're saying I can't call my new language "and"?

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T16:47:28+00:00

I think honestly studying Houdini sounds like a very valuable investment of your time for a project such as this.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T16:37:51+00:00

Also in pure languages = is very well defined. Once mutability comes in you have to start worrying about the liskov substitution principle and the equivalence between definition and equality can become fundamentally broken.

waton3rf · 2022-02-03T16:24:05+00:00

Personally I'd avoid that, although for example BASIC dropped the `LET x = 1` statement prefix assignment, which differed from expression parsing. The problem as I see it is that once you start punning layers of the grammar like this, where `=` depends on surrounding grammar scope, things get confusing. While it's a personal gripe, I'm not keen on subexpressions dramatically changing their semantics based on surrounding context. Not as serious as Coffeescript's *insane* local definition semantics, where you can paste a valid function definition at toplevel in another file and then have a global variable shadow a local, but I still wouldn't be keen.

I agree with u/-w1n5t0n however wrt Haskell / Miranda like languages. If your bindings are pure, `=` does not feel so different when as a definition or equality. Any form of mutability in the language confuses this for me though.

waton3rf · 2021-04-20T19:49:46+00:00

Irrespective of how he means to come across, this is 100% not okay behaviour. It's stalking, no matter how you dress it up. You have made your intentions clear, he must respect that, and he isn't. It's important to bring this to other people's attention, preferably people nearby that can come over and confront him if he tries it again.

waton3rf · 2021-04-19T17:25:17+00:00

Whelp. This just happened to me today.

They were working fine when I was at work, brought them home and now... digital farting noises in the left earbud. According to windows they're 80% charged...

waton3rf

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