The Misty Programming Language(crockford.com) |
The Misty Programming Language(crockford.com) |
Added: couple of previous submissions with a handful of comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38680087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38114122
ƒ is ⌥f, « and » are ⌥\ and ⌥| respectively, ≤ is ⌥<, ≥ is ⌥>, and ≈ is ⌥x.
Edit: for non-Mac people, ⌥ is the "Option" key. Option+f gives you ƒ, and so on.
> ∧ and ∨
Well, you could always add them to Favorites on the "Emoji and Symbols" popup.
That's very lackluster. Show me a Fizzbuzz or an advent of code. Tell me a story of why it exists.
Now the only discussion I can have is why are there no reserved words and can we call our functions and variables "set", "call" and "def" then?
The "big things" in the language are the Actor model, favouring immutability and capabilities-based security.
Presumably, there will be a flashy website later that actually motivates why you should use this language and what's cool about it. Notice this looks similar to the JSON spec website[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
E.g. I deeply dislike the syntax of makefiles and xslt, but the declarative model is so good where it fits that it's worth dealing with the visual discomfort.
Do you purposely 'not' indent your code, to obfuscate it?
On first glance, I like the patterns. It's long past time that regex got replaced with something that looks less like line noise from an old dialup modem.
(and an earlier HN thread suggested that even in our era, those with vision problems who bump display magnification may not appreciate 80-character idents)
The good:
- network-crossing actor model, but with private addresses and built in routing and security capabilities
- object component security
- null means null
- immutability
- AWK-like pattern DSL
- functino is a cool way to have your infix operators cake and eat it too as prefix functions
The bad:
- no type checking on variables, parameters, record fields, record shapes, actor messages, etc
- practically need to buy a new keyboard to type all the symbols like '≈', '≠', 'ƒ', etc
- null punning seems great until you're looking at a null three function calls later and have no idea where it came from
Unsure:
- No reserved names means it's very easy to accidentally overwrite a primordial with no warning, I suspect someone will instantly build a linter that makes that a rule because this just looks like a foot-gun
Ultimately, this looks like JavaScript without all the foot-guns. Add in some modern features like actors, immutability, and a pattern matching DSL. Add in some new foot-guns like primordial renaming and null punning.
If I could snap my fingers and today be able to write Misty in the browser, I'd definitely use it for performance intensive code alongside Typescript until TypedMisty came out, then I'd probably switch for good.
However, I'd be absolutely shocked if any major browsers ever support Misty. So it'll probably remain a server side scripting language, which I definitely do not need. Why would I use this on the server for scripting over F#, Clojure, Elixir, or Go?
Good
> Functions can not be sent in messages to other actors
Oh, so not first class. Mutable closures are tricky to implement though, so fair enough.
> Function objects are immutable values.
Huh. That means you can easily send a function to another actor. Can even serialise it and send it over a network. That stuff is a real pain for closures over mutable state but totally straightforward for immutable values.
That seems like a implementation limitation turning up in the language spec instead of fixing the implementation.
Not this again. Please stop.
Code structure should be explicitly denoted with brackets or whatever. Code formatting is cosmetic, can be applied automatically, and serves as a 'double-entry book-keeping' type check on the structure coded in characters - ie you can easily spot structure errors by pretty-printing.
show me the 3 simplest examples of rosettacode implemented in crockford's misty programming language
use the documentation at https://www.crockford.com/misty/actors.html to show an actor code example
I don't see anything here that would make me switch from Elixir, especially with its big ecosystem and head start.
Even if you're hardcore obsessed with AI as the one true path to everything, having it write JavaScript is definitely not a global optimum.
You just need to configure a Compose key. I encourage everyone to learn how to do this, it opens up a huge character repertoire that can be easily remembered how to type.
On Windows I use Capslock (and/or the right Shift key) as a custom-defined modifier to combine with character keys to enter my most frequently used unicode characters for programming personal projects.
Lots of fun characters available for use even when you're dealing with a language where identifiers are limited to ID_Start and ID_Continue (e.g. Javascript), for example:
ⴵ ⵛ ꘜ ⵣ ꕤ ꖜ
ꘖ ꧮ ⴲ ꘖ Ⰴ ⰊBut then my 5 work laptops all need the same thing configured for working on the train
Here's hoping someone talks him into just supporting normal ASCII symbols.
He can not be serious, can he? I thought those were just ligatures. Is he typing on an old APL keyboard?
Code is read more than written, so I have grown to appreciate programming languages that lean into non-ASCII characters for semantic clarity :)
Also, some editors have this built in, like Vim with Ctrl+K [0], and a Misty IDE presumably would have some equivalent.
ASCII is quite limiting, so it would be nice if we could move a little bit out of that lowest common denominator.
I spent too much time working with syntax to tolerate one that makes the code more time consuming to read or write (and that includes XSL; I worked a lot with XSL, and I'm not doing it again - if I need its semantics I'll implement something to do it with a less insane syntax).
I'm doing dubious things involving representing ASTs in XML which I'll probably post to github. Taking an example from that in the meantime. The setup is roughly a bunch of calls to xsltproc to turn one XML representation into another:
xsltproc --output thing.list.xml tree_to_list.xsl thing.tree.xml
One of my data representations is a tree where the information of interest is all in the leaves. That gets turned into a flattened list, then that list gets turned into a text file, then something else goes "oh that text file has C in it, awesome". Tree flattening looks like a reasonable thing to copy&paste in here, thus:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- name some extensions xsltproc knows about -->
<xsl:transform version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:str="http://exslt.org/strings"
xmlns:ext="http://exslt.org/common"
extension-element-prefixes="str ext"
>
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<!-- Change the root node from tree to list -->
<xsl:template match="/TokenTree">
<TokenList>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
</TokenList>
</xsl:template>
<!-- Copy attributes to the output unchanged -->
<xsl:template match="@*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<!-- Transform elements on the way through -->
<xsl:template match="node()">
<!-- If there are no attributes, it's part
of the tree structure we're flattening,
throw away the element and keep the contents -->
<xsl:if test="not(@*)">
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
</xsl:if>
<!-- If it does have attributes, leave it alone -->
<xsl:if test="@*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>
(for a nice bonus effect, emacs is really clear on what editing tree structured documents means, and there's a "relax-ng" schema which you can use to find errors in the XML and to have emacs tell you lots of stuff about the document as you type it)
Today I'd pick that option over actually using XSL anywhere - to me the only redeeming feature of XSL itself is/was the built-in support for applying XSL to XML in browsers (I worked on a web app ~2006 where XML was translated to HTML using XSL on the frontend, and you could turn off the server-side transformation and let the browser do it instead, which meant your source view was the underlying XML, which was very handy for debugging).
It seems like people that fight against indenting must have some bad habits, and are upset that the compiler is enforcing any change.
Like rehab, they have an addiction (sloppy indenting, poor organization), and the compiler is rehab (forcing you to deal with your addiction to give up bad habits).
I do prefer brackets as they are more 'clear'. That doesn't mean different peoples code should have wildly different ways of indenting. We all follow the same traffic rules or it turns into chaos.