oil VS TablaM

Some related references (on a somewhat messy wiki page) - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compact-AST-Representat...

Feel free to add others

will prevent almost all of the "silent footguns".

YSH has strict:all and then a bunch of NEW features.

There's been good feedback recently, which has led to many concrete changes. So your experience can definitely influence the language! https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-To-Send-Feedback

Regarding writing tools/tests/benchmarks in bash+Python, vs. writing tools in your main language:

I think we might eventually concede that something Debian-like is the “standard development environment” (at least for server side stuff, i.e. not iOS apps)

In this case, bash+Python is a non-issue. It works extremely reliably. That’s actually why I use it! Everything else seems to break, or it’s really slow (node.js is a very common alternative).

- Microsoft conceded this back in ~2017, by building Linux into their kernel with WSL, and providing Ubuntu on top

Yes bash + Python is a disaster on Windows (I have scars from it), but Microsoft agrees that the right place to solve that is in Windows :-)

- Every CI system runs Debian/Ubuntu

- Every hosting provider runs Debian/Ubuntu

- Every online dev env like gitpod.io provides Debian/Ubuntu

This is somewhat related to remote dev envs: https://lobste.rs/s/ucirlx/lapdev_self_hosted_remote_dev

One vision for https://www.oilshell.org/ is that the CI environment is the dev environment is the hosting environment.

Everything is just an equal node in a distributed system. BUT it’s more git like, in that you explicitly sync and work “locally”, wherever that is. You don’t have the network chatter and flakiness of “the cloud”.

Oils has a very large set of monotonically increasing properties too - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/quality.html

All that is bash+Python that is run on every commit, and it’s extremely good at catching bugs and perf regressions.

I’m skeptical that any project has that level of quality automation written in pure Rust or Zig. More likely it’s a bunch of cloud services with YAML.

Also a bunch of “hard-coded” toolchains that you can’t script with bespoke code. Like some shell commands in your package.json, which is just a worse way of writing a shell script.

Our quality process is all self-hosted, in the repo, and runs on both Github Actions and sourcehut - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/pub/metrics.wwz/line...

bash and Python runs perfectly on Github Actions and sourcehut, with zero change. Containers also do.

(Although we need to unify the CI and release, because the release runs on 2 different real hardware machines, while CI is cloud only.)

Also, a main point Oils is that bash now has another highly compatible, spec-driven implementation – OSH. Having 2 independent implementations is something newer languages don’t have.

(copy of lobste.rs comment)

in your bashrc to enable it. I've used it for probably ~18 years now.

It also works with https://www.oilshell.org/ since we use GNU readline. Just 'set -o vi' in ~/.config/oils/oshrc

No other shell does that.

But I didn't know it was called MULTIOS until now. (I guess that's read "mult I/O's"? I have a hard time not reading it was multi-OS :) )

It seems a bit niche to be honest, but it's possible to support in Oils.

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Oils also uses Unix domain sockets already for the headless shell protocol

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Headless-Mode

We could do something like dgsh, but so far I haven't seen a lot of uptake / demand. Every time it's mentioned, somebody kinda wants it, and then it kinda peters out again ... still possible though.

I think flat files work fine for a lot of use cases, and once you add streaming, you also want monitoring, more control over backpressure/queue sizes, etc.

which works well. You don't have to clean when rebuilding variants. IMO this is 100% essential for writing C++ these days. You need a bunch of test binaries, and all tests should be run with ASAN and UBSAN.

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I wrote a mini-bazel on top of Ninja with these features:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/10/garbage-collector.html...

So it's ~1700 lines, but for that you get the build macros like asdl_library() generating C++ and Python (the same as proto_library(), a schema language that generates code)

And it also correctly finds dependencies of code generators. So if you change a .py file that is imported by another .py file that is used to generated a C++ header, everything will work. That was one of the trickier bits, with Ninja implicit dependencies.

I also use the Bazel-target syntax like //core/process

This build file example mixes low level Ninja n.rule() and n.build() with high level r.cc_library() and so forth. I find this layering really does make it scale better for bigger projects

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/asdl/NINJA_subgr...

Some more description - https://lobste.rs/s/qnb7xt/ninja_is_enough_build_system#c_tu...

This is sort of a category error...

re2c is a lexer generator, and YAML and Python are recursive/nested formats.

You can definitely use re2c to lex them, but it's not the whole solution.

I use it for everything possible in https://www.oilshell.org, and it's amazing. It really reduces the amount of fiddly C code you need to parse languages, and it drops in anywhere.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS - https://www.oilshell.org/ - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/

I'm looking for people to help fill out the "standard library" for Oils/YSH. We're implementing a shell for Python and JavaScript programmers who avoid shell!

On the surface, this is writing some very simple functions in typed Python. But I've realized that the hardest parts are specifying, TESTING, and documenting what the functions do.

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The most recent release announcement also asks for help - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/01/release-0.19.0.html (long)

If you find all those details interesting (if maybe overwhelming), you might have a mind for language design, and could be a good person to help.

Surveying what Python and JavaScript do is very helpful, e.g. for the recent Str.replace() function, which is nontrivial (takes a regex or string, replacement template or string)

But there are also very simple methods to get started, like Dict.values() and List.indexOf(). Other people have already contributed code. Examples:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/58d847008427dba2e60fe...

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/8f38ee36d01162593e935...

This can also be useful to tell if you'll have fun working on the project - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-Contributors-Have...

More on #help-wanted on Zulip (requires login) - https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/417617-help-wa...

Please send a message on Github or Zulip! Or e-mail me andy at oilshell dot org.

This is true, but then the corrolary is that new PRs need to come with this higher and rigorous level of test coverage.

And then that becomes a bit of a barrier to contribution -- that's a harness

I often write entirely new test harnesses for features, e.g. for https://www.oilshell.org, many of them linked here . All of these run in the CI - https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/quality.html

The good thing is that it definitely helps me accept PRs faster. Current contributors are good at this kind of exhaustive testing, but many PRs aren't

> 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.