enso VS rakudo

I'm working on the Enso programming language (https://github.com/enso-org/enso), so I will be trying to solve the challenges in the Enso Analytics tool, as our team has been doing for the last two years.

It's always fun to see how we progressed since the previous challenge, making it more pleasant to work with (and also see where the rough corners still are).

Enso

> At least I have yet to see one that is actually useful in the sense of a generic (or even a single-purpose-built) language

Yeah as said, https://github.com/enso-org/enso seems to be a general purpose functional programming language with visual editor, but otherwise I haven't really seen any no-code solutions worth their salt. I'm not particularly a fan of enso either, but it's the best I've seen.

Although it's not quite the same, I do like what Enso[0] is bringing to the table, especially the 1:1 visual node/language interop. Whether this is generalisable to a fully decoupled interface remains to be seen, but there's definitely potential.

[0]: https://enso.org/

I think Enso is already taken by a YC company [0]. Could get confusing.

[0] https://enso.org

COMPANY: Enso Inc. TYPE: Full time LOCATION: Europe and United States of America – fully distributed company REMOTE: Only remote VISA: No VISA required DESCRIPTION: Hi, we are Enso (enso.org, Y Combinator S21)! We are looking for an amazing Cloud engineer to join our core team. We are a remote first company, working in Europe and the USA.

Friends of mine are developing Enso (https://enso.org/), an interactive programming language with dual visual and textual representations.

Even well before Bret Victor's time, there were tools for visual programming. I have been using LabView to maintain data processing in an optical laboratory.

Apart from being hacky, the EVAL approach added quite a bit of runtime overhead. Not only would it take time to create the string with Raku code to be evaluated, and run the evaluation itself (which could potentially happen at compile time, so not a real worry for modules). It would also process arguments at runtime. That runtime overhead also caused an issue to be made in early 2019: .assuming is painfully slow. But since there was no alternative approach available, the issue remained dormant for more than 6 years.

Sadly, Jonathan Worthington also indicated that they would only remain minimally involved in the further development of MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo in the foreseeable future. As such, (almost) all of their modules were moved to the Raku Community Modules Adoption Center, where they were updated and re-released.

After having done all that, and actually fixing some of the test failures, it was time to look at the still unsolved Rakudo issues that were marked with "... magical madness". The first issue I looked at was about the elucidation of sequences with complex numbers. That was actually actually an easy fix: it was almost more work to add a test for it.

About 3 weeks ago I thought it was time to go through the outstanding Rakudo compiler issues (an implementation of the Raku Programming Language) to see how many of them would have been fixed by now with the new Raku grammar.

To install Sparky - install Rakudo and then Sparky as a Raku module:

Fix IO::Path::parent #4795: merged 2022-02-19 Add more IO::Path::parent tests #801: merged 2022-02-19 Change parent to always just remove the last element #4800: merged 2022-02-26 Change .parent behavior to "stupid" resolving #802: merged 2022-02-26

This then became the Formatter class. And since this was a completely new feature, it only became available for use by opting into the 6.e.PREVIEW language version. And then it went largely unnoticed and uncared for the next 1.5 year. As clearly the time wasn't right for it yet.

The intended audience are those people willing to be early adopters of these exciting new features in the Raku Programming Language. The examples in this blog post will work in the next release of the Rakudo compiler (probably 2023.06), but are now already available in the bleeding edge version.

If you really want to look at this, you can find the code in src/Perl6/Grammar.nqp, src/Perl6/Actions.nqp and src/Perl6/World.nqp.