But that's exactly it - if the goal of this language is to prevent the type of failures that lead to the mars orbiter issue, then its an obvious failure. There's no possible way an interpreted language only usable on windows or mac would be controlling a mars orbiter - it just doesn't have the features neccesary for that usecase. Mars orbiters don't run Windows (nor should they).
That's ok of course, no language can be all things for all people and its ok to have a niche. But when the primary example justification for the language is a problem that the language couldn't possibly address, it suggests that it is hardly a well thought out language.
Almost none of the criticism here has been about the language itself, it has been about the blatent disconnect between what the language is and what it claims to try and do. Maybe its a good language in and of itself, hard to tell. At a glance it doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking, but it doesn't seem terrible either. However, I stand by it being an abject failure in terms of the stated goals of its marketing material.
Re:Beads: Computer language and toolchain
by magicmouse on Friday May 28, 2021 @03:21PM
(#27319432)
gee thanks for the kind words. You wrote one of the best comments i read.
NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter due to a confusion of values being in feet or meters. https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbi...
That is exactly the sort of mistake that the support for physical measurements mitigates.
There probably never will be a programming language that pleases all the syntax camps and all the semantics camps. Why not just use macro-assembler? It is the purest language that isn't binary machine code.