boba
Pipefish
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boba
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AG unification is the solution for type inference with scientific units
I've done a small implementation, used in type inference, in my language Boba. And you are correct, I used the linear equation solving method.
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November 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
The vast majority of October's improvements on Boba were type system and runtime bug fixes. In particular, the effect handler/delimited continuation semantics were hopelessly busted beyond a few simple examples I'd fixated on.
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October 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
September was another productive month for Boba, which is starting to get more 'quality of life' improvements rather than broad new features. That doesn't make the work less important: one of the bug fixes to the type inference engine last month caught a previously unseen bug in the core Boba libraries!
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Unit Type System
Also worth checking out is Adam Gundry's work on type inference for UoM types. Or, if you want an example implementation of the Abelian unification used in standard type inference extended with UoM types, you can reference my implementation, based on solving linear equations.
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September 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
August was a surprisingly productive month for the Boba compiler. A few highlights:
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August 2022 monthly "What are you working on?" thread
The next large feature for Boba (a general-purpose concatenative language) is language integrated property tests.
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Soft-launch Boba: a statically-typed concatenative programming language
That's a good question! I wrote up some of my thoughts on the benefits of Go as a backend, but there's also a historical component here. The first backend I was experimenting with was compile-to-C plus a C-based runtime. Go was closer to C than C# for what I needed at the time and I thought had a nicer concurrency story as a backend.
Pipefish
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Charm 0.4: a different kind of functional language
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.
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Charm 0.4: now with ... stability. And reasons why you should care about it.
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.
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Programming in Plain Language?
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?
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Embedding other languages in Charm: a draft
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.
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Lazy Let: A Cheap Way and Easy Way to Add Lazyness
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:
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[OC] Median yearly salaries in the US for all programming languages with more than 200 respondents in the StackOverflow Developer Survey
I guess it's time for me to put aside my exploration of Charm and set up a collaboration with my son the lyricist.
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Global and local variables, a choice of evils
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.
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What the imperative shell of an Functional Core/Imperative Shell language looks like
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.
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What are some cool things you've built using your own language?
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).
- Langception VIII: Ourobouros — I wrote Forth in Charm again
What are some alternatives?
Forscape - Scientific computing language
utop - Universal toplevel for OCaml
wort - A core concatenative programming language with variables and first-rank polymorphic type inference
sprig - Useful template functions for Go templates.
butter - A tasty language for building efficient software. WIP
awesome-low-level-programming-languages - A curated list of low level programming languages (i.e. suitable for OS and game programming)
wyvern - The Wyvern programming language.
xvm - Ecstasy and XVM
subtex - Lightweight latex-like language for authoring books
ShnooTalk - ShnooTalk is a new programming language
Skript - Skript is a Bukkit plugin which allows server admins to customize their server easily, but without the hassle of programming a plugin or asking/paying someone to program a plugin for them.