5 ms·

Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax

131 points by levosmetalo 9y ago

fiatjaf 9y ago
This looks great, the visual representation may be a killer feature, but the website could use a little more color. Also, it seems to be written in Java (run in the JVM?), so I will not touch it, but I hope others will.
- deependra 9y ago
  Yes, It runs on the JVM. I did a simple implementation with it and I am impressed. JVM is not a concern to me.
- maaaats 9y ago
  Why would that matter?
- sanjiva 9y ago
  JVM is not exposed at all. We plan to include OpenJDK in final distros so it runs totally self container. Absolutely no Java semantics or concepts are leaked to the language.
- cel1ne 9y ago
  What are your problems with the JVM, which is undoubtedly the most mature, advanced VM with the best DevOps-mechanisms out there?
redy 9y ago
This actually does look great. There's real value here. In a world being overrun with services what's desperately needed is an orchestration language. Such a language is severely focused on consuming services/messages, converting data, and then uploading data/messages. This is the next Unix shell; a tool whose only purpose would be to stitch together services, pipe data, schedule execution, and display results. An integration dsl. But it's not clear ballerina that can really do that. Would love to see a more real world example that demonstrates it really solves the integration/scripting problem.
- deependra 9y ago
  https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/tree/ballerina-by-example-src/samples/ballerina-by-example/examples https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/tree/ballerina-by...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sanjiva 9y ago
  Ballerina is designed exactly for that; to be the Unix shell of the Internet basically. Deep understanding of JSON, XML, MIME, SQL etc., networked execution naturally, parallelism naturally, resiliency, etc.. Only time will tell whether we get the mix right.
  - hliyan 9y ago
    The built in JSON type is a real killer feature for me: https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/blob/master/docs/specification/typesandvar.md https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/blob/master/docs/... Dealing with JSON objects in Java has been a pain which often caused me to pick Node.js. I always wanted another typed language that supports JSON literals...
deependra 9y ago
check the latest https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/releases https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/releases
cjhanks 9y ago
"Ballerina, TCL with a quazi-Golang syntax"
- mroll 9y ago
  I'm curious to know why you think there is a tcl connection? Not saying there isn't, just don't see it myself
ivanbakel 9y ago
There's looking to be a lot of value in visual languages - this isn't the first one to hit the FP in the last few weeks. We're probably beginning to appreciate the limits of text-based programming, and hopefully enough work goes into something different to create a tool with real productivity using visual code. The only trouble I can see is that there isn't a lot of speed at the moment in dragging and dropping to create graphs.
- jbl 9y ago
  I've been going back and forth on this for a while as I work on a product that allows users to build applications in a drag and drop visual manner. What I've seen is that while novices fairly quickly ramp up and get productive generating basic CRUD apps rapidly, they also rapidly hit a wall in two ways: 1. It can be hard or cumbersome to express more complex logic 2. The drag and drop interface often leads people to -assume- what the runtime will do. Right now, I'm leaning toward feeling that visualization should be a tool to understand the _behavior_ of what one has written, but not necessarily the thing one manipulates to express a program. Ballerina seems to be this, so I'm excited there!
- krylon 9y ago
  I currently have the "pleasure" of building a SharePoint workflow, which is done by clicking together building blocks in a graphical builder (running as part of Visual Studio). Maybe I am generalizing to hastily, but I absolutely despise the experience. In theory it sounds like a nice concept, in practice it tends to make trivial tasks exceedingly complicated[1]. And what would be a screen of code is several screens full of a block diagram. It is possible to zoom out, but text gets unreadable fairly quickly. [1] To be fair, I think that is probably more of SharePoint problem, whose complexity would be hilarious if I did not have to deal with it.
  - onetokeoverthe 9y ago
    You'd probably appreciate the movie Zero Theorem. The hero, a coder, is doing the same procedure...it's by the Monty Python people.
throwaway7645 9y ago
It seems to be fairly mature for something I've just heard of. It's crazy how many languages we have now. It's mostly a good thing, but I always wonder how nice it would be to have these immensely talented designers focusing on libraries for existing languages...etc. What is ballerina's performance? I assume it is alright being on the JVM?
- hemapani 9y ago
  It is compiled and output is bytecode. Currently bytecode interpreter is in Java. In the future, it can run on other languages (go?) or using something like LLVM with we write an interpreter for the bytecode. However, to do that we need to port the connectors, which is some work.
jancsika 9y ago
Does this language do animations to elucidate the flow of data?
- sanjiva 9y ago
  Not yet .. but we have a design for tracing the execution flow of every run at near zero cost and then playing back the execution trace. That's not saving all intermediate state but if you save the input (usually an HTTP request; so its saved in the logs) then you can easily debug production issues with it. If you meant debugging type stuff yes there's debugging already, including from the Idea plugin.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    Could one eventually build a TCP in Ballerina where the animated diagram is the program?
    - sanjiva 9y ago
      I missed replying to this .. yes one could easily. Making that perform at the same level as a TCP driver written in C could be a bit challenging .. but not impossible. In fact, expressing network interaction protocols is one motivation for the sequence diagram approach, but the expectation was higher level stuff like OpenID or SAML type interactions.
moocowtruck 9y ago
is this webpage really slow and hard to scroll for anyone else?
- pmontra 9y ago
  Not on my phone (Android + Firefox.) I didn't check the desktop site yet.
- MadhuraMendis 9y ago
  Whats the browser your using?
- train_robber 9y ago
  Me too. Chrome 59 on a Mac.
- drusepth 9y ago
  Pretty slow for me on Linux Chrome 59. I think there's some JS trying to "smooth" the scrolling (or at least that's how it looks) and/or handling those scroll animations at the top/bottom of the page, but affecting scrolling everywhere.
- aardshark 9y ago
  Yes, it's awful for me on Chrome 58. While I do need to update my browser, I tried on a couple of others and it seems much smoother on Firefox: Chrome 58 OSX: extremely janky, but I do have lots of tabs open. Chrome 61 Canary OSX: a little janky, but mostly ok. It's the only open tab. Firefox 54 OSX: smooth scrolling. It's the only open tab.

131 points by levosmetalo 9y ago

This looks great, the visual representation may be a killer feature, but the website could use a little more color. Also, it seems to be written in Java (run in the JVM?), so I will not touch it, but I hope others will.

deependra 9y ago
Yes, It runs on the JVM. I did a simple implementation with it and I am impressed. JVM is not a concern to me.
maaaats 9y ago
Why would that matter?
sanjiva 9y ago
JVM is not exposed at all. We plan to include OpenJDK in final distros so it runs totally self container. Absolutely no Java semantics or concepts are leaked to the language.
cel1ne 9y ago
What are your problems with the JVM, which is undoubtedly the most mature, advanced VM with the best DevOps-mechanisms out there?

redy 9y ago

This actually does look great. There's real value here. In a world being overrun with services what's desperately needed is an orchestration language. Such a language is severely focused on consuming services/messages, converting data, and then uploading data/messages. This is the next Unix shell; a tool whose only purpose would be to stitch together services, pipe data, schedule execution, and display results. An integration dsl. But it's not clear ballerina that can really do that. Would love to see a more real world example that demonstrates it really solves the integration/scripting problem.

deependra 9y ago
https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/tree/ballerina-by-example-src/samples/ballerina-by-example/examples https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/tree/ballerina-by...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sanjiva 9y ago
Ballerina is designed exactly for that; to be the Unix shell of the Internet basically. Deep understanding of JSON, XML, MIME, SQL etc., networked execution naturally, parallelism naturally, resiliency, etc.. Only time will tell whether we get the mix right.
- hliyan 9y ago
  The built in JSON type is a real killer feature for me: https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/blob/master/docs/specification/typesandvar.md https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/blob/master/docs/... Dealing with JSON objects in Java has been a pain which often caused me to pick Node.js. I always wanted another typed language that supports JSON literals...

deependra 9y ago

check the latest https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/releases https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/releases

cjhanks 9y ago

"Ballerina, TCL with a quazi-Golang syntax"

mroll 9y ago
I'm curious to know why you think there is a tcl connection? Not saying there isn't, just don't see it myself

ivanbakel 9y ago

There's looking to be a lot of value in visual languages - this isn't the first one to hit the FP in the last few weeks. We're probably beginning to appreciate the limits of text-based programming, and hopefully enough work goes into something different to create a tool with real productivity using visual code. The only trouble I can see is that there isn't a lot of speed at the moment in dragging and dropping to create graphs.

jbl 9y ago
I've been going back and forth on this for a while as I work on a product that allows users to build applications in a drag and drop visual manner. What I've seen is that while novices fairly quickly ramp up and get productive generating basic CRUD apps rapidly, they also rapidly hit a wall in two ways: 1. It can be hard or cumbersome to express more complex logic 2. The drag and drop interface often leads people to -assume- what the runtime will do. Right now, I'm leaning toward feeling that visualization should be a tool to understand the _behavior_ of what one has written, but not necessarily the thing one manipulates to express a program. Ballerina seems to be this, so I'm excited there!
krylon 9y ago
I currently have the "pleasure" of building a SharePoint workflow, which is done by clicking together building blocks in a graphical builder (running as part of Visual Studio). Maybe I am generalizing to hastily, but I absolutely despise the experience. In theory it sounds like a nice concept, in practice it tends to make trivial tasks exceedingly complicated[1]. And what would be a screen of code is several screens full of a block diagram. It is possible to zoom out, but text gets unreadable fairly quickly. [1] To be fair, I think that is probably more of SharePoint problem, whose complexity would be hilarious if I did not have to deal with it.
- onetokeoverthe 9y ago
  You'd probably appreciate the movie Zero Theorem. The hero, a coder, is doing the same procedure...it's by the Monty Python people.

throwaway7645 9y ago

It seems to be fairly mature for something I've just heard of. It's crazy how many languages we have now. It's mostly a good thing, but I always wonder how nice it would be to have these immensely talented designers focusing on libraries for existing languages...etc. What is ballerina's performance? I assume it is alright being on the JVM?

hemapani 9y ago
It is compiled and output is bytecode. Currently bytecode interpreter is in Java. In the future, it can run on other languages (go?) or using something like LLVM with we write an interpreter for the bytecode. However, to do that we need to port the connectors, which is some work.

jancsika 9y ago

Does this language do animations to elucidate the flow of data?

sanjiva 9y ago
Not yet .. but we have a design for tracing the execution flow of every run at near zero cost and then playing back the execution trace. That's not saving all intermediate state but if you save the input (usually an HTTP request; so its saved in the logs) then you can easily debug production issues with it. If you meant debugging type stuff yes there's debugging already, including from the Idea plugin.
- jancsika 9y ago
  Could one eventually build a TCP in Ballerina where the animated diagram is the program?
  - sanjiva 9y ago
    I missed replying to this .. yes one could easily. Making that perform at the same level as a TCP driver written in C could be a bit challenging .. but not impossible. In fact, expressing network interaction protocols is one motivation for the sequence diagram approach, but the expectation was higher level stuff like OpenID or SAML type interactions.

moocowtruck 9y ago

is this webpage really slow and hard to scroll for anyone else?

pmontra 9y ago
Not on my phone (Android + Firefox.) I didn't check the desktop site yet.
MadhuraMendis 9y ago
Whats the browser your using?
train_robber 9y ago
Me too. Chrome 59 on a Mac.
drusepth 9y ago
Pretty slow for me on Linux Chrome 59. I think there's some JS trying to "smooth" the scrolling (or at least that's how it looks) and/or handling those scroll animations at the top/bottom of the page, but affecting scrolling everywhere.
aardshark 9y ago
Yes, it's awful for me on Chrome 58. While I do need to update my browser, I tried on a couple of others and it seems much smoother on Firefox: Chrome 58 OSX: extremely janky, but I do have lots of tabs open. Chrome 61 Canary OSX: a little janky, but mostly ok. It's the only open tab. Firefox 54 OSX: smooth scrolling. It's the only open tab.