15 ms·

Lily Programming Language

210 points by alg0rith 10y ago

0x54MUR41 10y ago
Earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934295
chriswarbo 10y ago
Looks very nice! The templating and server support makes Lily look like a nice "next step" for PHP developers/shops/projects. PHP's "installed everywhere" feature is pretty hard to beat, especially for host-it-yourself projects like Wordpress. I could see such a language catching on for custom, in-house development though; for example to implement microservices. It's nice to see that there's a trend for such small, (relatively) simple languages to include nice features like first-class functions, convenient lambda notation, sum types, type inference, etc. A few years ago it seemed most new languages were just nitpicking over syntax, without bringing much to the table. I'm glad to see we're leaving the local minimum of "class-based OO with slight different static method mechanism"!
rmsaksida 10y ago
I love that there's a focus on low memory usage.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  I owe ESR a lot for writing about struct packing, because that's a large part of how Lily uses so little memory: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/
Profan 10y ago
I wish we had more actually decent statically typed interpreted languages (ones that are easily embeddable, to be precise), this looks very interesting. And no, AngelScript REALLY does not count as anything interesting. (unless you really really like C++)
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  I started working on an embeddable, byte-compiled dialect of Standard ML after coming to the realization that Lua with types (as I conceive of it) is extremely similar to ML, but I've had to put it on the backburner for now. But, I agree: a typed language that can be used as an embeddable extension/scripting language would be cool.
ebbv 10y ago
I like some of the things they're doing here but I have a big problem with the language design choice of having multiple valid syntax doing the same thing (e.g. declaring a new class as Cat('Spike'), Cat.new('Spike') or 'Spike' |> Cat.) I tend to subscribe to the philosophy that language designers should be as strict as possible; choose the "best" syntax for doing something and only allow that unless there's really compelling reasons for alternatives.
- stevedonovan 10y ago
  The idea was probably to show off the features; |> as a 'pipe operator' is cute. It was a bit jarring to see those different ways of constructing an object in one list.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  As stevedonovan says, the 'Spike' |> Cat is probably contrived. The feature probably exists for the sake of things like cats.map{|c| c.name} |> print Which is more readable to me than print(cats.map{|c| c.name}) It's a little jaring that it has both Cat(arg) and Cat.new(arg) syntax. But I wouldn't want to judge that without learning about the semantics that it emerges out of.
  - jesserayadkins2 10y ago
    They're the same thing. The first (Cat(arg)) is the same thing as the second (Cat.new(arg)). The reason for the distinction is...umm...I'm still not sure if I want to eventually include classes as values the way that other things are values. If you're grabbing the constructor as a function, for example, then it's a bit more sensible to use Cat instead of Cat.new. I don't know...it seemed at the time neat to allow a shorthand way of constructing something, but it's kinda wonky.
    - taftster 10y ago
      Hey, I just wanted to shout out and say that your reply here is refreshing. I appreciate that you admit that the feature is "kinda wonky" and that you're still looking at and intellectually rationalizing about such things. There's no harm in trying out the various constructor approaches, and then see how it feels in the real world. This is refreshing from other newish (cough golang) languages which pick the "wonky" path, but go on to defend it tirelessly. Keep up the good work.
alkonaut 10y ago
Love it. It's like someone used C# a lot and got fed up with how much cermony goes into making a simple sum type and exhaustive handling of the variants. A pet peeve of mine is the sloppyness by which .NET allocates things like iterators etc. I'd very much like to see zero-cost abstractions in a new language, so that there is no surprise differences between various ways of iterating over collections. I read it only quickly but couldn't find anything related to how enumeration/iteration works under the hood.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  Actually, no, I've never used C# except for a few minutes and only one time. I have more experience with the syntax of Scala and Rust. Between the two, I found Rust's more appealing. I like that enums serve a single purpose and can't be inherited. Currently, the best you can get for iteration of Lists and Hashes is to do each-ing the way you'd go about it in Ruby, except that the language currently lacks iterators. That's not to say I don't want iterators. But I've spent a huge amount of time of this release in making sure that all of the built-in classes get dynaloaded so that memory usage stays low. Now that everything's getting dynaloaded properly, I've less of a problem with doing iterators.
  - stevedonovan 10y ago
    Very cool - haven't come across a fun new language for a while. When thinking about iterators, think about coroutines a la Lua. Otherwise you're going to get yield-with-serious-restrictions.
    - DanWaterworth 10y ago
      When I was adding for each style loops to my language, plastic [1], I just opted for 'you can iterate over any expression that produces a coroutine'. It shouldn't cause any problems a tracing jit can't fix and it's super convenient. [1] https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic
- MichaelGG 10y ago
tomp 10y ago
print($"My name is ^(@name).") I don't understand why anyone would still require special notation for interpolated strings, when we have the awesome and unambiguous string interpolation syntax introduced by Swift (granted, this project was started in 2011, before Swift). > Reference counting has the benefit of giving consistent, and more easily measured performance. There's no fear of the garbage collector suddenly leaping into action right at the worst time, or having to tune the collector to minimize pauses. LoL. Refcounting can lead to just as long pauses as GC, if your reference is the last reference to a huge object graph.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  To my understanding, Swift wasn't public for a long time. The idea behind requiring a special syntax for interpolation is that it's supposed to be more clear as to do you really want interpolation, or do you not actually want it. I'm :/ about the interpolation syntax right now. One thing I wanted to avoid is telling people "oh no your string never terminated." You're right about reference counting being able to pause. But that's something you're more able to control. If you're doing game dev, you can say "I won't assign to references that might be big" during frame critical code. With garbage collection, you're more or less "Run the gc before, hope it doesn't trigger during that critical spot." or the alternative of fiddling with the gc/manually firing it off so it doesn't stop your world when it's a bad time to stop the world.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > print($"My name is ^(@name).") > > I don't understand why anyone would still require special notation for interpolated strings, when we have the awesome and unambiguous string interpolation syntax introduced by Swift (granted, this project was started in 2011, before Swift). Why should the swift syntax be considered the default now? "My name is $blah." has been the de-facto standard for ages. Personally I like interpolation sigils since in most cases you don't actually use it, and languages like Scala allow you to define custom sigils with custom behaviour. For example, Slick defines a sql"SELECT * FROM table WHERE username=$username" syntax that does not cause SQL injection issues.
- berdario 10y ago
spriggan3 10y ago
What about polymorphism ? How does one deal with low coupling? For instance, in PHP I would have used interfaces to decouple collaborators.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  No traits yet. A few other things need to be done first. Generics need to be name-able, System F, and core api is a more pressing need right now. My plan is to tackle traits in a few months, so long as everything goes well. But I want the above stuff done first, so that when I do traits I can start thinking about higher kinded types, trait inference, and the like.
idank 10y ago
This is an impressive volume of work, especially for one person. How do you stay motivated?
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  First of all, thank you! As for what motivates me, it's a few different things: * The challenge of it. Lily's one of the few things that I've done where I feel really challenged, and where I can actually make a true difference in it. It gives me something to do, something that I can always be refining and thinking about. * I -strongly- believe there is a market for this. I want to see this used in game development, used in server development, and used standalone. It's really, really fast scripting language with static typing that brings a unique blend of features that allow for terse code. I want to eventually port this to Arduino, just to say that I did it (Lily boots in 6K with 64-bit pointers, so I think it's possible). * It's something that I can put at the top of my resume. * I balance what I do. You might see me spend a week doing plumbing work in lexer, and the next I jump around and patch different places in emitter. I try to not stick in any one area too long. If I do a feature that's difficult and takes a long time, I balance that out with what I term "candy". Candy, in this case, being something that's more immediately visible. I added the constructor shorthand syntax shortly after doing type erasure. Type erasure took a month, and I was a little burned after that. So I balanced it out with a feature that was easier, and had a more visible effect on the language. * Once a week, I'll go over what I've done, and sort of pat myself on the back, and also think of "Alright, X is done..." and it always goes to "So what's next week?" There's never been a "I'm done". Honestly? The first two years were the hardest, because I didn't have a product that I cared much for. These last three have been easier, because I'm excited about what I'm doing, and there's a more broad spectrum of what I can do. * You all. No, seriously, I'm finding myself more often talking to different communities about what I've done. I talked to 4chan's /g/ last night. Sometimes I talk to different boards on Reddit, sometimes I try to talk here. I tried Slashdot once, but they didn't bother to even approve the article. Some people give crummy comments, but seeing the new stars, seeing people say they're willing to try the language, that means a lot to me. I really enjoy engaging people when it's over text about what I've done, since I'm comfortable when talking over text and I don't get RL opportunities to talk about what I do hardly ever since I don't know anyone personally RL who does coding for a living, and I'm a pretty stay-to-myself person.
S4M 10y ago
Does it support operator overloading? I tried it quickly (`define +(...){...}`) but it didn't work. Maybe there is a notation for it but I couldn't find it in the tutorial.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  There's no operator overloading. I'm pretty reluctant to add it too, because I've seen it be abused far, far too many times. It has uses, yes, but I'm not very interested in it at the moment. I won't say absolutely no to it, but if it were to be added, it wouldn't be right now. There's too much api that needs doing right now.
  - S4M 10y ago
    That's a fair point but on the other hand I think operator overloading is a must to be able to program math formulas in a language. Do you plan to have something like `const` as well? If so, how about allowing operators, but only if they don't modify the object (though, that rules out stuff like+=).
    - jesserayadkins2 10y ago
      Const is something that I'd like to think over before adding it. A question I have is what happens if a List is const, or should it just be that only primitives are const? I could see const values being optimized as just literals down under the hood, which would be nice for performance. I'd have to have a long, long think before adding operator overloading. It's got uses for math, but thus far I've been reluctant to add features that can be abused or used improperly like native class dtors or finally.
      - marktangotango 10y ago
        Have you looked into the difference between c++ const and java final for an example of different semantics? Suffice it to say the two are very different. Not sure why anyone would be doing math code in an interpreted language, I guess if it where embedded in game engine that would be desirable, but then users may wrap c/c++ math libraries with swig-alike to use, using the ffi, whatever that turns out to be.
wired_devil 10y ago
I don't like this syntax: "if: {". Using ":" for a one line statement is ok, but in most cases you have to use multiple lines and end up with two identifiers that represent the same thing. Maybe you can make the "{" for multiple lines and ":" for one line. I like to have an indentifier for one line statements, unlike the C approach.
- childintime 10y ago
  I don't like the colon too. Not in Python, not in Nim. It seems jarring to me, something someone fearful of programming might want! Also, as Larry Wall said: everybody wants the colon, so it is an extremely useful symbol elsewhere! A shame to waste it. That being said, this is by a long shot the most tasteful little language seen in a long time.
rufusroflpunch 10y ago
I really dig the syntax of this language, I must say. Great job. I'm interested in the embeddability of this language. There doesn't seem to be any documentation on the API features, short of looking through the source code. I would be greatly interested in this. Specifically, how to add calls that the Lily code can call, or how to call Lily code from within the interpreter.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  This is a big problem in the language now. There's no solid apis for working with the frontend (invoking the parser and getting a result). The backend apis are acceptable, except that it's difficult to move values around. I'm a couple of weeks away from the end of a three month release window, so I've (for the moment) given up on trying to finish the apis. But I'm not far from having them done. A month, maybe? But after that, I'll write a guide on how to embed Lily, and how to extend it. For the moment, your best bet if you're creating a standalone package like postgres is to refer to how postgres structures the dynaload table. If you're looking to embed the interpreter, it's awkward and hard. Once this release cycle ends (July 10, Lily's true 5 year anniversary), it's the first thing on my list. I want to give people a solid api so that other people can start building stuff and not have to worry about me breaking it. First the api, then the tooling, then documentation. You've got my word on that (and HN won't let me delete this, on top of that).
arranf 10y ago
What can I go out and immediately build in Lily as a "useful" hello world program?
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  That's a good question, and unfortunately one that I'm at a loss as to how to answer right now. I've been focused more on building it, and less on using it. However, I've been looking to change that lately now that the core is becoming more stable and usable.
  - arranf 10y ago
    Awesome I would love to get to grips with this and start building.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mhd 10y ago
The language itself might be quite different, but a few of the design parameters remind me of Wren[1], another language that's on my "try to embed it somewhere" list... [1]: https://github.com/munificent/wren https://github.com/munificent/wren
codezero 10y ago
This looks pretty cool. When ever I discover a new language, I try to find out why it was created. Why did you make Lily? Are you aiming to solve any specific problems, or is it a fun project you wanted to do?
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  Thanks! I started Lily to be an alternative to PHP. The first commit was adding templating support, and it was a while before the language could be standalone. I had two requirements when creating and designing Lily: One, that the language had to be interpreted. I didn't want to offer people an alternative to PHP but then tell them that they would need to repeatedly run compile passes over it. Facebook has HipHop, and it transforms PHP into C++. I wanted a language that could be used like PHP, but having a faster interpreter wasn't enough. The other requirement was to have a statically-typed language. I believed that a statically-typed language would lend itself to better transformation into a lower-level language. In theory, an llvm frontend might also be writable that took Lily as input. I wanted Lily to outperform PHP both when interpreted, and when compiled. Over time, the focus broadened once I realized Lily's low memory usage, and how fast the turnaround of the parser is.
  - codezero 10y ago
    Awesome, thanks for sharing this!
a_c 10y ago
Hello jesse, it is one hell of an inspiring work! I read from your blog that you are self-taught programmer. Would you mind sharing something about yourself? In particular, I'm interested in area like what do you do for your day job? Is it programming related? What resources did you come across that you find particularly useful in making lily? Anything would be appreciated!
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  Thank you! As for me, I'm not so sure what to share. I'm not all that exciting. Most of the time I have I spend on Lily. Once in a while I take a break. But I don't get out that often. Lily's nice in that it's a place for me to do something and feel like I make a difference. My day job? For most of the time that I worked on Lily, I was working part-time at [redacted] as a Maintenance Assistant. My favorite memory was talking shop with a guy there who had some computer knowledge. He asked what I had done and I told him that I had just written a garbage collector and that it was so awesome because it took just a week and it went well. He answered me saying something to the effect of "Well of course you wrote a good garbage collector, you're Maintenance! That's what you do!" We both had a good laugh at it. I've never had a job doing software development. I recently left [redacted] to pursue a job in software, but haven't had much luck with it. I'm still holding out hope though. So, no, my job isn't programming related. Resources? My strategy is that when I get up to something new, I do all of the research that I can both in the topic itself, as well as how other languages do it. One example would be Exceptions. I didn't know how to do that, so I started researching how Python did it, how Java did them, Ruby, etc. I started thinking of what I wanted, and also what the goal of having them in my language was. I also made sure to search through Haskell, Scala, Rust, and OCaml since they don't use exceptions as much. The point being that I wanted to know what languages do when they tend to not use exceptions. Rather than starting off as "This is a good idea", I instead approach it as, "I think I would like X. How does that typically get done?" For resources, the most helpful thing I've read has been ESR's guide on struct packing: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ I'm afraid not much else comes to mind though.
  - a_c 10y ago
malcium 10y ago
Why did you name it Lily?
- feiss 10y ago
  Already answered :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12017668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12017668
malcium 10y ago
Why did you name it Lily? That's my daughter's name so I'm genuinely curious.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  I couldn't think of a good name. I had ideas of something like Meteor or Hurricane or Tornado. The first was taken, and I -very- quickly had second thoughts about the other two. My mom, from time to time, mentioned that she really liked the name Lily. After giving it a lot of thought, I said, "You know, why not go with that?" I've grown to like it.
  - feiss 10y ago
    I think it's a great choice, it's catchy, short, simple and kind. A perfect fit for a programming language, I love it.
PeCaN 10y ago
I registered #lily on Freenode if you want it. Impressive work! I think this is the first relatively conventional language that I've gotten really excited about in a while. It's a really nice blend of features and a quality implementation. Definitely going to use it next time I embed a language.
akavel 10y ago
• Have you considered allowing returning multiple values, like in Lua and Go, and also returning errors through them? esp. instead of exceptions? (Though I suspect this could be problematic to match with the sweet |> pipe operator) • Have you considered supporting Lisp/Scheme-like or Rust-like macros? or Rebol-like DSLs? (though I suppose the latter are probably strongly tied to Rebol's minimalistic syntax)
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  Multiple return values I'm not very interested in. Lily has first-class tuples, and you can return a tuple which I might later add in desugaring for. But multiple return values themselves cause a lot of problems with the internals being pretty set on 0 or 1 return. Macros are a hard no. DSLs, maybe. For the latter, I could see allowing a pluggable import handler through Lily's options. But I'm reluctant to commit to a yes or no on that at the moment, since I'd rather get over the hump of api not being fully fleshed out.
  - akavel 10y ago
    Didn't realize about tuples, thanks for info! Are they typechecked on length? Out of curiosity, can I ask for your reasons about macros, if you have them fleshed out enough? Not really sure what you mean by "pluggable import handler" in this context, though. Tx!
  - technomancy 10y ago
    Really glad to hear that about multiple return values. In my mind multiple return values are a solution for the problem of "oh, we haven't invented pattern matching yet", and matching against tuples is soooo much cleaner and more consistent.
percept 10y ago
Is Lily a cat? Anyway, somebody hire this guy. I'm sure someone that can do this is qualified to make web CRUD for lots of money (should he so desire).
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  No, I'm just terrible at making up examples so cats! Cats everywhere!
hyperpape 10y ago
Is the speed of startup entirely based on the dynaloading, or are there other choices that make it faster than Lua?

210 points by alg0rith 10y ago

Earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934295

Looks very nice! The templating and server support makes Lily look like a nice "next step" for PHP developers/shops/projects. PHP's "installed everywhere" feature is pretty hard to beat, especially for host-it-yourself projects like Wordpress. I could see such a language catching on for custom, in-house development though; for example to implement microservices. It's nice to see that there's a trend for such small, (relatively) simple languages to include nice features like first-class functions, convenient lambda notation, sum types, type inference, etc. A few years ago it seemed most new languages were just nitpicking over syntax, without bringing much to the table. I'm glad to see we're leaving the local minimum of "class-based OO with slight different static method mechanism"!

rmsaksida 10y ago

I love that there's a focus on low memory usage.

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
I owe ESR a lot for writing about struct packing, because that's a large part of how Lily uses so little memory: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/

Profan 10y ago

I wish we had more actually decent statically typed interpreted languages (ones that are easily embeddable, to be precise), this looks very interesting. And no, AngelScript REALLY does not count as anything interesting. (unless you really really like C++)

groovy2shoes 10y ago
I started working on an embeddable, byte-compiled dialect of Standard ML after coming to the realization that Lua with types (as I conceive of it) is extremely similar to ML, but I've had to put it on the backburner for now. But, I agree: a typed language that can be used as an embeddable extension/scripting language would be cool.

ebbv 10y ago

I like some of the things they're doing here but I have a big problem with the language design choice of having multiple valid syntax doing the same thing (e.g. declaring a new class as Cat('Spike'), Cat.new('Spike') or 'Spike' |> Cat.) I tend to subscribe to the philosophy that language designers should be as strict as possible; choose the "best" syntax for doing something and only allow that unless there's really compelling reasons for alternatives.

stevedonovan 10y ago
The idea was probably to show off the features; |> as a 'pipe operator' is cute. It was a bit jarring to see those different ways of constructing an object in one list.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
As stevedonovan says, the 'Spike' |> Cat is probably contrived. The feature probably exists for the sake of things like cats.map{|c| c.name} |> print Which is more readable to me than print(cats.map{|c| c.name}) It's a little jaring that it has both Cat(arg) and Cat.new(arg) syntax. But I wouldn't want to judge that without learning about the semantics that it emerges out of.
- jesserayadkins2 10y ago
  They're the same thing. The first (Cat(arg)) is the same thing as the second (Cat.new(arg)). The reason for the distinction is...umm...I'm still not sure if I want to eventually include classes as values the way that other things are values. If you're grabbing the constructor as a function, for example, then it's a bit more sensible to use Cat instead of Cat.new. I don't know...it seemed at the time neat to allow a shorthand way of constructing something, but it's kinda wonky.
  - taftster 10y ago
    Hey, I just wanted to shout out and say that your reply here is refreshing. I appreciate that you admit that the feature is "kinda wonky" and that you're still looking at and intellectually rationalizing about such things. There's no harm in trying out the various constructor approaches, and then see how it feels in the real world. This is refreshing from other newish (cough golang) languages which pick the "wonky" path, but go on to defend it tirelessly. Keep up the good work.

alkonaut 10y ago

Love it. It's like someone used C# a lot and got fed up with how much cermony goes into making a simple sum type and exhaustive handling of the variants. A pet peeve of mine is the sloppyness by which .NET allocates things like iterators etc. I'd very much like to see zero-cost abstractions in a new language, so that there is no surprise differences between various ways of iterating over collections. I read it only quickly but couldn't find anything related to how enumeration/iteration works under the hood.

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
Actually, no, I've never used C# except for a few minutes and only one time. I have more experience with the syntax of Scala and Rust. Between the two, I found Rust's more appealing. I like that enums serve a single purpose and can't be inherited. Currently, the best you can get for iteration of Lists and Hashes is to do each-ing the way you'd go about it in Ruby, except that the language currently lacks iterators. That's not to say I don't want iterators. But I've spent a huge amount of time of this release in making sure that all of the built-in classes get dynaloaded so that memory usage stays low. Now that everything's getting dynaloaded properly, I've less of a problem with doing iterators.
- stevedonovan 10y ago
  Very cool - haven't come across a fun new language for a while. When thinking about iterators, think about coroutines a la Lua. Otherwise you're going to get yield-with-serious-restrictions.
  - DanWaterworth 10y ago
    When I was adding for each style loops to my language, plastic [1], I just opted for 'you can iterate over any expression that produces a coroutine'. It shouldn't cause any problems a tracing jit can't fix and it's super convenient. [1] https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic https://github.com/DanielWaterworth/plastic
MichaelGG 10y ago

tomp 10y ago

print($"My name is ^(@name).") I don't understand why anyone would still require special notation for interpolated strings, when we have the awesome and unambiguous string interpolation syntax introduced by Swift (granted, this project was started in 2011, before Swift). > Reference counting has the benefit of giving consistent, and more easily measured performance. There's no fear of the garbage collector suddenly leaping into action right at the worst time, or having to tune the collector to minimize pauses. LoL. Refcounting can lead to just as long pauses as GC, if your reference is the last reference to a huge object graph.

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
To my understanding, Swift wasn't public for a long time. The idea behind requiring a special syntax for interpolation is that it's supposed to be more clear as to do you really want interpolation, or do you not actually want it. I'm :/ about the interpolation syntax right now. One thing I wanted to avoid is telling people "oh no your string never terminated." You're right about reference counting being able to pause. But that's something you're more able to control. If you're doing game dev, you can say "I won't assign to references that might be big" during frame critical code. With garbage collection, you're more or less "Run the gc before, hope it doesn't trigger during that critical spot." or the alternative of fiddling with the gc/manually firing it off so it doesn't stop your world when it's a bad time to stop the world.
Nullabillity 10y ago
> print($"My name is ^(@name).") > > I don't understand why anyone would still require special notation for interpolated strings, when we have the awesome and unambiguous string interpolation syntax introduced by Swift (granted, this project was started in 2011, before Swift). Why should the swift syntax be considered the default now? "My name is $blah." has been the de-facto standard for ages. Personally I like interpolation sigils since in most cases you don't actually use it, and languages like Scala allow you to define custom sigils with custom behaviour. For example, Slick defines a sql"SELECT * FROM table WHERE username=$username" syntax that does not cause SQL injection issues.
berdario 10y ago

spriggan3 10y ago

What about polymorphism ? How does one deal with low coupling? For instance, in PHP I would have used interfaces to decouple collaborators.

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
No traits yet. A few other things need to be done first. Generics need to be name-able, System F, and core api is a more pressing need right now. My plan is to tackle traits in a few months, so long as everything goes well. But I want the above stuff done first, so that when I do traits I can start thinking about higher kinded types, trait inference, and the like.

idank 10y ago

This is an impressive volume of work, especially for one person. How do you stay motivated?

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
First of all, thank you! As for what motivates me, it's a few different things: * The challenge of it. Lily's one of the few things that I've done where I feel really challenged, and where I can actually make a true difference in it. It gives me something to do, something that I can always be refining and thinking about. * I -strongly- believe there is a market for this. I want to see this used in game development, used in server development, and used standalone. It's really, really fast scripting language with static typing that brings a unique blend of features that allow for terse code. I want to eventually port this to Arduino, just to say that I did it (Lily boots in 6K with 64-bit pointers, so I think it's possible). * It's something that I can put at the top of my resume. * I balance what I do. You might see me spend a week doing plumbing work in lexer, and the next I jump around and patch different places in emitter. I try to not stick in any one area too long. If I do a feature that's difficult and takes a long time, I balance that out with what I term "candy". Candy, in this case, being something that's more immediately visible. I added the constructor shorthand syntax shortly after doing type erasure. Type erasure took a month, and I was a little burned after that. So I balanced it out with a feature that was easier, and had a more visible effect on the language. * Once a week, I'll go over what I've done, and sort of pat myself on the back, and also think of "Alright, X is done..." and it always goes to "So what's next week?" There's never been a "I'm done". Honestly? The first two years were the hardest, because I didn't have a product that I cared much for. These last three have been easier, because I'm excited about what I'm doing, and there's a more broad spectrum of what I can do. * You all. No, seriously, I'm finding myself more often talking to different communities about what I've done. I talked to 4chan's /g/ last night. Sometimes I talk to different boards on Reddit, sometimes I try to talk here. I tried Slashdot once, but they didn't bother to even approve the article. Some people give crummy comments, but seeing the new stars, seeing people say they're willing to try the language, that means a lot to me. I really enjoy engaging people when it's over text about what I've done, since I'm comfortable when talking over text and I don't get RL opportunities to talk about what I do hardly ever since I don't know anyone personally RL who does coding for a living, and I'm a pretty stay-to-myself person.

S4M 10y ago

Does it support operator overloading? I tried it quickly (`define +(...){...}`) but it didn't work. Maybe there is a notation for it but I couldn't find it in the tutorial.

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
There's no operator overloading. I'm pretty reluctant to add it too, because I've seen it be abused far, far too many times. It has uses, yes, but I'm not very interested in it at the moment. I won't say absolutely no to it, but if it were to be added, it wouldn't be right now. There's too much api that needs doing right now.
- S4M 10y ago
  That's a fair point but on the other hand I think operator overloading is a must to be able to program math formulas in a language. Do you plan to have something like `const` as well? If so, how about allowing operators, but only if they don't modify the object (though, that rules out stuff like+=).
  - jesserayadkins2 10y ago
    Const is something that I'd like to think over before adding it. A question I have is what happens if a List is const, or should it just be that only primitives are const? I could see const values being optimized as just literals down under the hood, which would be nice for performance. I'd have to have a long, long think before adding operator overloading. It's got uses for math, but thus far I've been reluctant to add features that can be abused or used improperly like native class dtors or finally.
    - marktangotango 10y ago
      Have you looked into the difference between c++ const and java final for an example of different semantics? Suffice it to say the two are very different. Not sure why anyone would be doing math code in an interpreted language, I guess if it where embedded in game engine that would be desirable, but then users may wrap c/c++ math libraries with swig-alike to use, using the ffi, whatever that turns out to be.

wired_devil 10y ago

I don't like this syntax: "if: {". Using ":" for a one line statement is ok, but in most cases you have to use multiple lines and end up with two identifiers that represent the same thing. Maybe you can make the "{" for multiple lines and ":" for one line. I like to have an indentifier for one line statements, unlike the C approach.

childintime 10y ago
I don't like the colon too. Not in Python, not in Nim. It seems jarring to me, something someone fearful of programming might want! Also, as Larry Wall said: everybody wants the colon, so it is an extremely useful symbol elsewhere! A shame to waste it. That being said, this is by a long shot the most tasteful little language seen in a long time.

rufusroflpunch 10y ago

I really dig the syntax of this language, I must say. Great job. I'm interested in the embeddability of this language. There doesn't seem to be any documentation on the API features, short of looking through the source code. I would be greatly interested in this. Specifically, how to add calls that the Lily code can call, or how to call Lily code from within the interpreter.

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
This is a big problem in the language now. There's no solid apis for working with the frontend (invoking the parser and getting a result). The backend apis are acceptable, except that it's difficult to move values around. I'm a couple of weeks away from the end of a three month release window, so I've (for the moment) given up on trying to finish the apis. But I'm not far from having them done. A month, maybe? But after that, I'll write a guide on how to embed Lily, and how to extend it. For the moment, your best bet if you're creating a standalone package like postgres is to refer to how postgres structures the dynaload table. If you're looking to embed the interpreter, it's awkward and hard. Once this release cycle ends (July 10, Lily's true 5 year anniversary), it's the first thing on my list. I want to give people a solid api so that other people can start building stuff and not have to worry about me breaking it. First the api, then the tooling, then documentation. You've got my word on that (and HN won't let me delete this, on top of that).

arranf 10y ago

What can I go out and immediately build in Lily as a "useful" hello world program?

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
That's a good question, and unfortunately one that I'm at a loss as to how to answer right now. I've been focused more on building it, and less on using it. However, I've been looking to change that lately now that the core is becoming more stable and usable.
- arranf 10y ago
  Awesome I would love to get to grips with this and start building.

deleted 10y ago

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mhd 10y ago

The language itself might be quite different, but a few of the design parameters remind me of Wren[1], another language that's on my "try to embed it somewhere" list... [1]: https://github.com/munificent/wren https://github.com/munificent/wren

codezero 10y ago

This looks pretty cool. When ever I discover a new language, I try to find out why it was created. Why did you make Lily? Are you aiming to solve any specific problems, or is it a fun project you wanted to do?

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
Thanks! I started Lily to be an alternative to PHP. The first commit was adding templating support, and it was a while before the language could be standalone. I had two requirements when creating and designing Lily: One, that the language had to be interpreted. I didn't want to offer people an alternative to PHP but then tell them that they would need to repeatedly run compile passes over it. Facebook has HipHop, and it transforms PHP into C++. I wanted a language that could be used like PHP, but having a faster interpreter wasn't enough. The other requirement was to have a statically-typed language. I believed that a statically-typed language would lend itself to better transformation into a lower-level language. In theory, an llvm frontend might also be writable that took Lily as input. I wanted Lily to outperform PHP both when interpreted, and when compiled. Over time, the focus broadened once I realized Lily's low memory usage, and how fast the turnaround of the parser is.
- codezero 10y ago
  Awesome, thanks for sharing this!

a_c 10y ago

Hello jesse, it is one hell of an inspiring work! I read from your blog that you are self-taught programmer. Would you mind sharing something about yourself? In particular, I'm interested in area like what do you do for your day job? Is it programming related? What resources did you come across that you find particularly useful in making lily? Anything would be appreciated!

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
Thank you! As for me, I'm not so sure what to share. I'm not all that exciting. Most of the time I have I spend on Lily. Once in a while I take a break. But I don't get out that often. Lily's nice in that it's a place for me to do something and feel like I make a difference. My day job? For most of the time that I worked on Lily, I was working part-time at [redacted] as a Maintenance Assistant. My favorite memory was talking shop with a guy there who had some computer knowledge. He asked what I had done and I told him that I had just written a garbage collector and that it was so awesome because it took just a week and it went well. He answered me saying something to the effect of "Well of course you wrote a good garbage collector, you're Maintenance! That's what you do!" We both had a good laugh at it. I've never had a job doing software development. I recently left [redacted] to pursue a job in software, but haven't had much luck with it. I'm still holding out hope though. So, no, my job isn't programming related. Resources? My strategy is that when I get up to something new, I do all of the research that I can both in the topic itself, as well as how other languages do it. One example would be Exceptions. I didn't know how to do that, so I started researching how Python did it, how Java did them, Ruby, etc. I started thinking of what I wanted, and also what the goal of having them in my language was. I also made sure to search through Haskell, Scala, Rust, and OCaml since they don't use exceptions as much. The point being that I wanted to know what languages do when they tend to not use exceptions. Rather than starting off as "This is a good idea", I instead approach it as, "I think I would like X. How does that typically get done?" For resources, the most helpful thing I've read has been ESR's guide on struct packing: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ I'm afraid not much else comes to mind though.
- a_c 10y ago

malcium 10y ago

Why did you name it Lily?

feiss 10y ago
Already answered :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12017668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12017668

malcium 10y ago

Why did you name it Lily? That's my daughter's name so I'm genuinely curious.

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
I couldn't think of a good name. I had ideas of something like Meteor or Hurricane or Tornado. The first was taken, and I -very- quickly had second thoughts about the other two. My mom, from time to time, mentioned that she really liked the name Lily. After giving it a lot of thought, I said, "You know, why not go with that?" I've grown to like it.
- feiss 10y ago
  I think it's a great choice, it's catchy, short, simple and kind. A perfect fit for a programming language, I love it.

PeCaN 10y ago

I registered #lily on Freenode if you want it. Impressive work! I think this is the first relatively conventional language that I've gotten really excited about in a while. It's a really nice blend of features and a quality implementation. Definitely going to use it next time I embed a language.

akavel 10y ago

• Have you considered allowing returning multiple values, like in Lua and Go, and also returning errors through them? esp. instead of exceptions? (Though I suspect this could be problematic to match with the sweet |> pipe operator) • Have you considered supporting Lisp/Scheme-like or Rust-like macros? or Rebol-like DSLs? (though I suppose the latter are probably strongly tied to Rebol's minimalistic syntax)

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
Multiple return values I'm not very interested in. Lily has first-class tuples, and you can return a tuple which I might later add in desugaring for. But multiple return values themselves cause a lot of problems with the internals being pretty set on 0 or 1 return. Macros are a hard no. DSLs, maybe. For the latter, I could see allowing a pluggable import handler through Lily's options. But I'm reluctant to commit to a yes or no on that at the moment, since I'd rather get over the hump of api not being fully fleshed out.
- akavel 10y ago
  Didn't realize about tuples, thanks for info! Are they typechecked on length? Out of curiosity, can I ask for your reasons about macros, if you have them fleshed out enough? Not really sure what you mean by "pluggable import handler" in this context, though. Tx!
- technomancy 10y ago
  Really glad to hear that about multiple return values. In my mind multiple return values are a solution for the problem of "oh, we haven't invented pattern matching yet", and matching against tuples is soooo much cleaner and more consistent.

percept 10y ago

Is Lily a cat? Anyway, somebody hire this guy. I'm sure someone that can do this is qualified to make web CRUD for lots of money (should he so desire).

jesserayadkins2 10y ago
No, I'm just terrible at making up examples so cats! Cats everywhere!

hyperpape 10y ago

Is the speed of startup entirely based on the dynaloading, or are there other choices that make it faster than Lua?