News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Beads: Computer language and toolchain by ModernMech on Thursday May 27, 2021 @12:21PM (#27304831)
> You have an embedded graph database? Why? This is just a symptom of developers general disrespect for the depth and complexity of databases.

I disagree. This is a recognition of the fact that the line between database, programming language, and operating system is very blurry. It's not that the programming language has a graph database tacked on, it's that the language is a database and leverages that fact to provide features impossible or hard to come by in more conventional languages (e.g. transactional updates, time travel debugging, what-if scenarios, etc.). Still, nothing would prevent you from using whatever database you want in the usual way.

Re:Beads: Computer language and toolchain by magicmouse on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:35PM (#27309937)
If you use an external database you are not going to get time travel debugging, nor will you have a perfectly uniform internal representation of values. Beads has a primitive type of physical units of measure, so you can store 3 Newtons which internally will be stored as the magnitude 3 plus an array of fundamental units with their exponents. This datatype is not found in MySQL, so external databases work okay as long as you aren't trying to time travel, and either limit yourself to very traditional COBOL era datatypes, or convert everything into string form like JSON has to do.

Beads also has addresses that can be written to the hard drive, because addresses in Beads are not pointers to RAM. How can you store a traditional C pointer into a MySQL database? You can't, you have use a key. which creates baggage.

The virtues of having a simple database inside the language, and a layout/drawing/event model are myriad, and I invite you folks to take it for a spin.

Some of the batteries-included integrated environments like VB6 and Borland Delphi are beloved by their users. Simplicity is wonderful, and i have tried so hard to make Beads simplify the very difficult task of making graphical interactive software.

Re:Beads: Computer language and toolchain by zubairq on Friday May 28, 2021 @12:55AM (#27311867)
I think I mentioned the time travelling debugger part of beads earlier. Having built a time travelling debugger a few years ago in clojurescript I immediately understood that this would be the killer feature of beads (for me at least). I do also realise that a lot of the comments here are attacking the author of beads or the initial presentation based on the website. This means that people either like a good flame war or that they need to dig further into the product, which is quite solid. Anyway fixing the home page of beads and the messaging of beads is probably one of easier things to fix , compared with making beads itself
Re:Beads: Computer language and toolchain by blacktriangle on Friday May 28, 2021 @09:15AM (#27314957)
The websites main video is a weird tangent about phones and desktops now both being 64bit. I don't think time travel debugging was even alluded to on the main page.

Developers do not have time to dig through every project's poor marketing in hopes of finding the motivation. The burden is on the project to sell developers, either quickly through explaining their killer features, or for more complicated projects by actually building something with their tools.

Re:Beads: Computer language and toolchain by zubairq on Friday May 28, 2021 @11:43PM (#27322867)
Yes I 100% agree. The author of Beads needs to fix the marketing message.