Algebralang Alternatives

algebralang reviews and mentions

• Software Mimicry
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Nov 2022

  I experiment with programming language theory and designs as a hobby and one of my thoughts is that the core underlying problem of computing is an arrangement problem of a turing machine. Compiling is "planning what you shall do". Execution is "doing". We have the luxury of many ways of doing things in computing. But it all seems to lead to mess of poor understandability and complexity.

  What am I trying to say? OOP inheritance hiarchy trees are limited and not what you really want to do to represent your problem. I want to define a situation or scenario and define what should happen in that scenario. This is where asynchronous programming and join calculus shines. I also like occam-pi's select statement and golang's select. I also feel every computing problem is the "expression problem" manifested. How do you associate behaviour (what to do) with a type (a situation)? And how do you define them so you don't have to reimplement all the previously existing behaviours with the new thing?

  The next section shall be reductive.

  Ultimately all loops, function application, methods, expressions, variables, classes, functions, lists, vectors, data structures, algorithms exist as "things" in the imagination of the developer's mind and the compiler. They don't exist in machine code.

  We have a grid of memory locations and the arrangement of things in that grid is handled by a memory allocator. We also have references in this grid as pointers, which form a structure of their own. A turing machine.

  Thinking of a type and behaviour as being solely one thing only at a time is inherently limiting. I often want to see different things "as" something else to talk about them in a slightly different approach. A vector or ArrayList of objects of multiple types but processed in the same approach, efficient compile time polymorphism.

  This is kind of how I imagine object orientated development to really be about, I want to be capable of referring to an arbitrary selection of objects and define new behaviours or relations between the objects. Unfortunately most OOP ties imperative behaviour and stateful manipulation to data rather than modify exhibited behaviours of objects. Imagine being capable of organising and managing load balancers and draining them and devops architecture with code. A point and click GUI where I can right click a load balancer and click drain. (I don't mean code to bring them up or create them but to actually administrate them with OOP)

  I think the expression problem is a core problem of modern computing and doesn't have an efficient solution.

  We can decouple data structure, layout and algorithm. Unfortunately most programming languages couple data structure + layout (C) and OOP languages couple algorithm with layout. Functional programming languages I'm not sure about.

  I called this idea of software mimicry as branching libraries in my ideas document (link in profile)

  I've been working with C++ templates today with C++20 coroutines and multithreading and I am finding template instantiation very interesting. I've been late to come around to it.

  This comment mentioned the insight that boxing and template instantiation are related. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14764780

  I am also working on a multithreaded programming language which looks similar to Javascript. I use an actor implementation that can send messages between threads.

  https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

  One of my programming language designs is the idea that every line of code is a concurrent process and data flow is scheduled by topological sorting. Iteration is handled automatically for you. Every variable is actually a relation and algebraic definition of relations between processes. This is called algebralang. https://github.com/samsquire/algebralang

  The idea is that you write the underlying insight into the problem as an expression of what you want to do and let the computer schedule the ordering or arrangement of operations to do it. It's a form of pattern matching on the state of things (objects in the system) and declaration of the desired result. This brings to mind the rete algorithm (expert systems) and differential dataflow.

• Syntax Design
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Oct 2022

  I began designing a language that handled handled recursion and iteration as relations between variables which are topologically sorted to determine control flow.

  Each function is a toplogical graph of stream functions so it is similar to a data flow language or reactive programming language. The goal is that you should express the critical insight of the algorithm to work out what to write and the code is not nested so there is very little tree structure.

  Algebralang is rough notes on how it would appear.

  https://github.com/samsquire/algebralang

  Example programs in the repository are binary search, btrees, a* algorithm.

  I wrote a multithreaded parallel actor interpreter in Java and it uses an invented assembly language which doesn't have a bytecode, it's just text.

  I like the ideas behind ani language