magicmouse

3 年前discuss

Although the language i have been working on includes time travel as a built-in feature, i find that i almost never use it, because in a deductive language, it is not that easy to create a bug.

Time travel is great for understanding someone else's large program, so that you can see where it goes as it is running. In large projects the instruction pointer is hop around madly throughout the code, and seeing where it goes like the path of a bird is rather handy.

magicmouse

4 年前discuss

Most of his predictions are nonsense, and show a lack of understanding of the logical foundations of modern computing. His assertion that instruction sets are "obsolete" is absurd. The Turing/Von Neumann computer uses an instruction set and RAM to do computing. He is proposing some nebulous jelly computer that would be unprogrammable.

The idea that ordinary people can write their own OS is laughable. There are several million lines of code in every OS related to just drawing and responding to a text entry field. There aren't even 100 people who know the TrueType language which underlies all font rendering. The last small team generated OS of any accomplishment was the Oberon project at ETH, and that was decades ago, before the web, and his team of very smart people were not ordinary.

Hardware has to evolve with software. Intel cross-point memory tech, which was marketed under the Optane name, failed because people didn't know how to use it properly. New hardware will easily be stunted if it can't get traction. Look at the failure of the Adapteva Epiphany chip. It was a 10X improvement in computation per watt, but nobody knows how to program/debug a chip with thousands of independent cores.

The underlying mathematics that we all use originates from linear, sequential, Greek Proof, and we have no parallel logic math developed yet.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

To use the color picker, click on a color swatch, and it will copy the color name in the format selected to the clipboard.

the source code for this color picker is on github https://github.com/magicmouse/beads-examples/tree/master/Exa...

If there are any other output formats that you need, please let me know.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

yes, it is a higher level language, that is ideal for making web apps.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

The Multics operating system, which was funded by the DARPA at MIT's Project Mac for 10 years, was superior to Unix from a technical standpoint, and it used segmentation.

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~solomon/cs537-old/last/segmentatio...

Unix has Paging but not segmentation. Segmentation allows you to grow a memory block without having to copy as it grows, something that just plain paging cannot do.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

no, there is a typo in the video. The SDK is the best authority for Beads examples, as those are checked on each build for any errors. We have about 20 sample programs, some large enough to show most of the language features.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

Excel achieves its robustness (and it hardly ever crashes) by protecting the user against arithmetic errors, and circular reasoning. Excel doesn't offer infinite precision arithmetic, that is rarely needed in practice.

Null pointers are something that plagues Java, which are primarily caused by having some computation out of sequence. By using the State-Action-Model pattern, most of Beads code will be devoted to rendering the model on the screen, and that one-way transfer of information can be made very robust, provided you have a closed arithmetic, which it does.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

Meteor has a lot of users, and is still around. The problem with Meteor is that it uses JS, and that language has a lot of problems. Typescript has clobbered meteor, as people have realized that JS makes it far too easy to make a typographical error that crashes at runtime.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

if i can find a better cross platform delivery mechanism than AIR that isn't too far away from JS, i will switch, as there are a fair number of Linux-based programmers out there. Sorry for the current inconvenience of requiring Wine. But it does run okay according to some of my users.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

gee thanks for the kind words. You wrote one of the best comments i read.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

The problem with both Swift and Kotlin, is that you must use libraries to draw and handle events, which typically makes it tied to a single OS (Swift only really being used in OSX at present). Kotlin might rely on the very extensive JVM libraries, which are horrendously complicated.

I don't know what you mean by a step backwards. This a batteries-included environment like VB6 and Borland Delphi, but emits to the current web app universe we live in, so it is definitely in the now.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

I don't find Red particularly readable, it is a bit too dense for my taste. But some people will love it, and they have a very active Gitter group, and they are very nice people.

Red is the best funded language that i know of. Nenad did an initial coin offering (ICO) that was successful, and by my estimates will never have to work again. He has a good-sized team, and is building a very powerful product. Don't confuse his frugality with the financial independence he possesses due to his good timing at jumping onto the crypto bandwagon.

I don't know how you describe Rebol/Red. It a language made out of various subdomain specific languages, with a very unique syntax. It is very brief, and to me looking at it from a distance it more resembles FORTH or Postscript than any Algol derivative language.

Red has not prioritized graphical interactive products. I think its best subsystem is its amazing PARSE module, which is second only to Icon in text processing power.

There are other interesting projects like Enso, but they will probably run out of money, but i will wager Red will still be going strong 10 years from now.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

many people, myself included, view Web Assembly has a future virtual machine that is universally available across hardware, ending the hassle of making specific executables for each operating system. A kind of improved P-Code system, if you are familiar with how UCSD Pascal worked (another brilliant Prof. Wirth project).

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

Neo4J has a souped SQL language they call Cypher to perform queries. But since Beads data structures are typically arranged in tree form, one typically uses the loop construct to interate across them, as one is often drawing them. To that end, Beads has a fairly elaborate loop construct, with the ability to traverse 1 or 2 dimensions at once, or do a recursive descent traversal.

In a graphical programming environment one is really listing and drawing the content for editing, versus making a list of something.

You can send subtrees across the wire conveniently, subscribe to a remote machine's subtree, etc. and you can write to the hard drive the trees.

However concurrency is not really present in the system as i am emitting JS which is a single threaded system for the most part. So Beads has almost zero concurrency support at present.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

I was kicked out of the future of coding chat group by Ivan Reese, who exercised his cancel culture powers to permanently ban someone for daring to say that Steve Jobs had cojones for ordering hundreds of millions of dollars in parts for his products before they even shipped and knew if people liked them, unlikes the cowards at HP who only bought 10k Idea Pads (which preceded the iPad). It is ridiculous to equate a colorful, and accurate, word "cojones" with a descent into madness. Steve Jobs by most personal accounts had a bad temper, but he was amazing, and I for one miss his great designs and inventions that he brought forth. To me, Steve Jobs is the most exciting inventor of my lifetime, an incredible example of masculine energy focused in a constructive and creative manner.

The community didn't vote on it, Ivan exercised his power, because has a personal dislike for me. I met a few nice people on that discord group, but didn't enjoy being followed around by word police.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

I just updated the program to allow arbitrary arrays of words and factors for division, so now it is a fizz-buzz-jazz version of the program, and it gets even shorter once you go to table driven data.

    var ss = ""
    var color = ALICE_BLUE

    loop across:WORDS index:wordx
     if mod(b.cell_seq, PRIMES[wordx]) == 0
      WORDS[wordx] &=> ss
      color = COLORS[wordx]
    if ss == ""
     //  plain cell
     ss = to_str(b.cell_seq)

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

Ah, i see i forgot to update the comment when i changed to one day so i could test it easier... thanks for pointing that out, will correct.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

Okay, i didn't know you had to put in spaces in HN comments to get it to format, here is the regular expression in classic Unix style versus Beads style for the IPv4 address (1.2.3.4):

JS style: (\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\.(\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5]){3}

Beads style:

     pattern octet 
     group or
      digit         //  matches 0..9
      set:'1-9' digit   //  matches 10 .. 99
      '1' digit digit   //  matches 100 .. 199
      '2' set:'0-4' digit  //  matches 200 .. 249
      '25' set:'0-5'   //  matches 250 ..255

    pattern IPv4
       octet '.' octet '.' octet '.' octet

As you can see the Beads pattern notation allow subroutines, uses keywords like 'digit' instead of \d, and is far more readable. There are plenty of examples, and the more complex the expression the more favorable the comparison.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

Compared to HTML/CSS/JS, Beads is much simpler. You can learn Beads in probably under 10 hours, while CSS takes at least 100 hours to master.

Most of the older popular languages like C, C++, Java, have huge external libraries you have to learn to make graphical interactive software.

So for the target application area, which is graphical interactive software, Beads is far simpler, and has many features to avoid error at compile time, and keep running with fault tolerance at execution time.

magicmouse

5 年前discuss

I don't see similarities with COBOL other than Beads has a low percentage of punctuation, but that is from imitating Python's indent-significant code structure style.

COBOL generated a lot of billable hours. I did early years in my career as a consultant-for-hire in a SF body shop, and occasionally would have to fix some COBOL thing. I sure hated it. Woke up one day in a puddle of drool from passing out because of boredom, and then switched jobs.

Beads is from a word-count metric, is probably within 20% of the minimum word count for the sample programs i presented, if you exclude techniques that greatly obfuscate the logic such as those used in Oscar Toledo's famous chess program.

Substitution and concatenative languages like FORTH regularly win code-length contests, but they aren't very readable. Beads tries to find a happy medium between brevity and clarity. I think people writing it will enjoy the careful balance that was struck.

magicmouse

Submissions

Show HN: A handy color picker for programmers and web designers

Show HN: A handy color picker for HTMN, C, etc.

Show HN: Is this the shortest possible version of Life?

Tesla is a bubble that will slowly deflate

Show HN: A open source graphical translation management utility

Sho HN: Building a chess program using the Beads layout system

Show HN: A device simulator that cycles through many mobile device simulations

Why rubberized interfaces are essential today, a 2 minute vid on Beads language

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