Re:Minimalism in programming language design
by carapace on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @10:49AM
(#31492849)
Hear, hear! Wise words from the genius who created Turing Drawings.
It's becoming more and more important to treat complexity as a kind of technical debt that has the potential at any moment to metastasize into eldritch horror.
I've been playing with what you could call a minimalist programming language: Joy created by Manfred von Thun (who was a philosophy professor! See "A Conversation with Manfred von Thun" http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10000350 ) It combines features of Lisp and Forth, and I suspect it may be the simplest useful language. The syntax is enormously simple, and the semantics are likewise simple. It's easy to reason about functions and derive them in a mathematical way using simple algebra, so it's hard to introduce bugs. I recently found a very good 2017 talk by Jon Purdy describing concatinative programming and it's quirks and (potential) advantages: Stanford Seminar - "Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IgqJr8jG8M
Anyway, it's made me "allergic" to complexity. I tried Rust. Wrote the beginning of a Joy interpreter. I paused for a month and came back to it and it had become Greek to me, and I can't read Greek. :( Now part of that is just I 'm getting old, but a lot of it is the complexity of Rust.
I don't want to pick on Rust though, complexity itself is the enemy (Rust is, if anything, an improvement on most of what has come before it, eh? I think only Ada can really be said to be Rust's peer?)
It's becoming more and more important to treat complexity as a kind of technical debt that has the potential at any moment to metastasize into eldritch horror.
I've been playing with what you could call a minimalist programming language: Joy created by Manfred von Thun (who was a philosophy professor! See "A Conversation with Manfred von Thun" http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10000350 ) It combines features of Lisp and Forth, and I suspect it may be the simplest useful language. The syntax is enormously simple, and the semantics are likewise simple. It's easy to reason about functions and derive them in a mathematical way using simple algebra, so it's hard to introduce bugs. I recently found a very good 2017 talk by Jon Purdy describing concatinative programming and it's quirks and (potential) advantages: Stanford Seminar - "Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IgqJr8jG8M
Anyway, it's made me "allergic" to complexity. I tried Rust. Wrote the beginning of a Joy interpreter. I paused for a month and came back to it and it had become Greek to me, and I can't read Greek. :( Now part of that is just I 'm getting old, but a lot of it is the complexity of Rust.
I don't want to pick on Rust though, complexity itself is the enemy (Rust is, if anything, an improvement on most of what has come before it, eh? I think only Ada can really be said to be Rust's peer?)