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Proposal 2 — A Language |
Here I propose a language by way of a garden path by describing Forth (as I learn it for real), and APL, LISP, REBOL, Smalltalk, and other cool languages that aren't quite as mainstream as I'm used to. I don't care that I'm not adding anything original to this language. I'm going to steal steal steal good ideas from others as much as possible.
The humble spreadsheet is first not because it's a normal programming language but because it's an example of where we want to end up.
I really like the way the process starts out. I import some data and incrementally tell the program the semantics: I tell it to interpret tabs as column delimeters and that while it got the type of the first column correct the second column is supposed to be a currency. I like being able to build up the DAG of equations and see how the data change as I tweak it. I like the ability to experiment and make something before I know exactly what the model is going to be.
What I don't like is that I don't get the benefits of source control and that some types of calculations don't work well in the dataflow-like langauge.
Forth is an interesting language because it's both low level and high level at the same time. It's mind bending that a system that can serve as an assembly language can also be used for AI research. I love seeing examples of people starting off with a Forth prompt on a computer with nothing else, not even an operating system, and building a usable system from it.
I'm also sure that nostalgia has something to do with my interest in it. I started programming in the 1980s and Forth, as far as I remember, had a reputation of being the hacker's language. When I think of Forth I think of a black/green CRT with a blinking cursor in a dark room.
I think also the whole nip/tuck constrained puzzle nature of the language is intriguing to me.
And one doesn't start off by talking about Forth's grammar, as there really isn't one. The interpreter essentially just handles each whitespace-delimited token individually, executing the token if it's defined in the word dictionary, and pushing it onto the stack if it's not.
The language essentially just starts out with a linked list used as the dictionary and a few built-in words. Everything else can be built from that. Using the wonderful jonesforth as a starting place, let's describe some build-in words.
- DROP -- Drop the top of the stack
- SWAP -- Swap the top two elements on the stack
- DUP and ?DUP -- Duplicate the top of the stack and do it only if it's not empty
- OVER -- Push a copy of the second element onto the stack
- ROT and -ROT -- Rotate the top three values of the stack
- INCR and DECR -- Increment or decrement the top of the stack
- FETCH and STORE -- Fetch and store from/to memory
- Math and comparison words
What I want from Forth isn't necessarily the exact language and syntax, but the simple runtime: A linked list and a stupidly simple interpreter.
We also need to look at Joy.
Rebol has a naming problem. Up until just recently it was spelled REBOL like languages from the 1950s and even though it's supposed to be pronounced like rebel it looks like it rhymes with COBOL. Now you take that naming problem and combine it with the fact that all we know about the language is that it's supposed to be simple to program in (ummmm... like COBOL) makes it a language that I want to maintain a large distance from.
If you somehow get past the name and find a screenshot of an application written in Rebol then you shutter and say "Oh my god it looks like an application written in 1995."
In fact, it was indeed stuck in 1995 until just very recently. It was a closed-source, commercial programming language that wasn't backed by a major corporation. If nothing else that would have killed it off.
We've now filtered out like 99.99999% of the programmers in the world and if you've made it this far then you'll find a kernel of beauty.
And as of 2018 there are zero academic articles on this language/environment.
Rebol satisfies a bunch of the requirements for my computer. It's tiny, the runtime for the GUI is only a megabyte and full applications written in Rebol are on the order of 10s of kilobytes at the most.
Like many languages types can be inferred from the syntax of values, but Rebol goes much further than most and includes type inference for date/times, currency, tags, email addresses, urls, filenames, pairs, and ids (what they call issues).
All code and data are defined within blocks (enclosed in square brackets). Variables are defined with the colon and functions wih the func or function words. A particularly interesting feature is that one can refine blocks, strings, and functions with a slash. You can use this to pull a value from a dictionary or select an option on a function.
Because Rebol has a very simple syntax that's homoiconic it should be relatively easy to create a nicer syntax that's isomorphic to it.
What really blows my mind is seeing something like a spreadsheet written in only 80 lines of Rebol. I think that the test for my new language is that one should be able to write a spreadsheet or similarly complex program in less than a hundred lines of code.
What I want to steel from Rebol is the tiny complete library, tiny apps, and minimal code for making a graphical app. What I like about this form of creating an application over using an IDE like XCode to create an iOS app is that it's much easier to communicate text than option-clicking on one part and then dragging it to another part and then releasing it.
We also need to look at Flutter.
Plot Device is a library/app written in Python. I like how it shows the editor and output all on one screen. It's very easy to make some beautiful graphical output. And one pattern I like is the grid function that allows us to define an x×y grid and then iterate through it as if it were a single list.
Plot Device is also beautiful by default, which I think is important.
The structure of Eve is probably the closest of any of these languages to what I want. The editor is more like a word processor with runable blocks of code. I like good typography so while I'm coding I want to see my text beautifully drawn on the screen. I really dislike the way TeX and "modern" Markdown editors show the markup in my main view.
What I don't like about Eve is that it's web-focused and I want to disassociate myself from that world. That doesn't mean I can't steal a lot of good ideas from it.
Batteries Included, Batteries Included, Batteries Included!!!