Pipefish VS TablaM

Charm is a language where Functional-Core/Imperative-Shell is the language paradigm and not just something you can choose to do in Python or Ruby or PHP or JS or your favorite lightweight dynamic language. Because of the sort of use-cases that this implies, it didn't seem suitable to write another Lisp or another ML, so I got to do some completely blank-slate design. This gives us Charm, a functional language which has no pattern-matching, no currying, no monads, no macros, no homoiconicity, nor a mathematically interesting type system — but which does have purity, referential transparency, immutability, multiple dispatch, a touch of lazy evaluation, REPL-oriented development, hotcoding, microservices … and SQL interop because everyone's going to want that.

I think it's fair to call this a language announcement because although I've been posting here about this project for a loooong time, I've finally gotten to what I'm going to call a "working prototype" as defined here. Charm has a complete core language, it has libraries and tooling, it has some new and awesome features of its own. So … welcome to Charm 0.4! Installation instructions are here. It has a language tutorial/manual/wiki, besides lots of other documentation; people who just want to dive straight in could look at the tutorial Writing an Adventure Game in Charm.

In my own language there is some syntactic flexibility but the only thing that describe pretty table could mean would be the second of the possibilities above; the first would be expressed by describe prettyTable and the third by describe PRETTY, table. This makes it more readable from the point of view of a coder, and who else is going to want to read it, my mom?

I've been trying to think of a way of doing this which is simple and consistent and which can be extended by other people, so if someone wanted to embed e.g. Prolog in Charm they could do it without any help from me.

Charm does this for declaration of local constants in functions (there are no local variables in functions). So for example if you wanted to write the Collatz function this way (which you wouldn't, it's just a minimal example) then you could do so without worrying about a computational explosion:

I guess it's time for me to put aside my exploration of Charm and set up a collaboration with my son the lyricist.

In fact that's how a lot of Charm programs end up getting written, because you want to pass a whole bundle of stuff to the functions. For example.

No, it's "shell" as in "shell of the code". The idea is that the imperative bits of the language, the bits that do the mutation of state and the IO, can can call lovely pure referentially transparent functions. But functions can't call commands (otherwise by definition they wouldn't be pure). So all your imperative-ness is reduced to about 1% of your code which lives right at the top of your call stack --- the "imperative shell" of your code. See [here](https://github.com/tim-hardcastle/Charm/blob/main/examples/adv.ch) for an example. The "imperative shell" is the main function --- all 13 lines of it --- and everything everywhere else is pure and immutable.

I'm not sure what counts as cool. It's just dogfooding at the moment. I did a bunch of other languages (only the BASIC and the Forth are up to date with the current version of the language I think), and I did a tiny adventure game (and used it as the basis for a tutorial).

> Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off.

I work in this space (small/mid-size).

The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.

The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.

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My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).

Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:

- A programming language

- A database engine

- An orchestration engine

- ELT engine

- Auth

- UI/Report builders

And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.

NONE.

This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.

This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).

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So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).

Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.

P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: TablaM relational language (https://tablam.org)

TablaM is an in-progress programming language to provide a more ergonomic experience for building data-oriented applications.

This means that where most languages are focused on low-level details or engineering at large, TablaM is tailored with some small & big design decisions to make it enjoyable to write applications for e-commerce, finance, ERPs, and similar.

Cool things:

- TablaM marry the array + relational models. It means we should get very little need for manual loops and all the ops are vectorized.

Yeah, I worked on https://tablam.org and https://spacetimedb.com.

It becomes pretty clear that `order` is a significant property to make useful (and performant!) programs. "Duplicates" is also required to make usefull programs.

One nonobvious reason for this: You wanna report that a `customer` has a duplicated key `1`. If you CAN'T model `[(customer.id = 1), (customer.id = 1)]` then you can't report errors! And `erroneous` data is VITAL to make useful programs because then the only possibility is "perfect" data, and that is not possible!

Another reason is that we want to `count` duplicates, to see `duplicates`, and other NON-obvious at first: "What is a duplicate?". Get fun with floats, Unicode, combining case and non-case sensitive input... and is obvious that for useful programs IS REQUIRED to support bags in an extended version of the relational model.

And yet...

IS very important to remember about `set semantics` and try to adhere to it when makes sense. Your query planner will like it. You "valid" constraints like it. And `unique index` like it. And so on...

Finally, for app development, I will "suggest" everyone use my lang https://tablam.org!

This is moe interesting than it looks, probably because the best part (IMHO) is about the type system, that is what enables the other ideas.

> In Julia, types are first-class and every value has a type

This is what I do from the start in https://tablam.org and only later found that is not common! Is so intuitive this way and simpler to check, by a lot. In fact, I waste so much time adapting type inference algorithms that are hard to translate because for some reason graphs are imposed on trees, types are second-class and live at a distance (and erased) and all is a mess this way.

The relational model already makes this so simple: `project / rename / extend` relational operators cover you.

From this other facilities become possible. Note how in `SQL` you don't have functions as first-class per se, but now try to imagine that a function is a table and suddenly, is much better!

My relational lang (https://tablam.org) that I wish to be a Excel + Access replacement is still half-backed.

I move it slowly in my personal computer but not much in public. Maybe adding another person will help me on that!

> what is a good alternative to Access (or Fox, I add)

Nothing.

Access is(was) in fact a worse alternative to Fox:

- Much worse DB engine, and that is saying a lot (FoxPro db can and get corrupted. A typical functionality that was added to any fox codebase was a utility to fix it)

- MUCH MUCH worse programming language (VB) that is neither good as-is, much less as a data-programing language.

Fox/dbase is the only data-oriented language that was relatively popular and fit for the use-case.

This is by a mile the main point: Is a desert looking for languages that are made for business app/data oriented programing (and much harder looking for something not weird).

The main options: Fox/dBase/Informix(? not remember), kdb+, Cobol, SQL(when extended as store procedure lang with loops and that)

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This point is big. Having a good form builder (that is already rare) is not enough to be a real contender for this space. You need a language where making queries is truly nice.

In short, you need a language that is `LINQ/Relational` as first-class end-to-end.

- If this lang needs an ORM: FAIL.

- If this lang needs to compose strings to make a query: FAIL.

- If exist "impedance mismatch" between data manipulation/queries and the rest of the lang: FAIL.

- It should also support super-advanced types like date, decimal, currency and ideally dimensional units. Ideally algebraic types as today.

- It should have a version of Rust `serve, Into/From` for easy conversion between data + formats.

- It should look "normal" like python/swift with `LINQ` queries.

This is the lang I trying to build: https://tablam.org

> I asked was about querying data without ever using a SQL language, like tapping directly into the data.

I agree (making https://tablam.org to try a fix & working on https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB in the SQL conformance).

Before I think SQL was bad. *Now I'm certain*. SQL is absurdly massive for things that could have collapse all the features 10x or more.

However, working in an RDBM now I also understand why is not desirable to make "raw" calls to the DB: The engine MUST mediate all the calls to make things works (from query optimization, execution, iteration, lock management, transaction management, etc).

Is incredible how much sophistication is in a simple `SELECT * FROM table`.

What I wish is to build a `Wasm-like` IR so that is what anybody target, and `SQL` is not the mediator.

In my case each lang I have learned (+12) I start coding a mini-ORM. I have done the same so many times, and that is a good way to learn from me. Also, I have to learn Rust building https://tablam.org.

It sounds puzzling, I start learning Rust with https://tablam.org and probably was making my life harder trying to do "advanced" stuff when not have any idea of what I was doing.