11 ms·

Vigil, the eternal morally vigilant programming language

173 points by nikolasavic 9y ago

bitL 9y ago
Can't wait until this is noticed by a manager with a PhD from protestant theology and decided to be used/implemented :D Referential self-punishment. Self-removing code during runtime based on a predestined moral functor.
nickpsecurity 9y ago
You use this for high-level parts of the app. You drop down to HolyC for anything it can't handle.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  HolyC is awesome. Aw, Terry's YouTube channel was taken down. He did so many walkthroughs of HolyC and his dynamic programming engine. Oh well, 353 videos were archived at least. Thank goodness for archive.org! https://archive.org/details/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChannelArchive https://archive.org/details/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChanne... HolyC: https://archive.org/download/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChannelArchive/20140907%20-%20160%20-%205gfoDHycEi0%20-%20TempleOS%20-%20HolyC.mp4 https://archive.org/download/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChann... Flight simulator: https://ia801506.us.archive.org/2/items/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChannelArchive/20131003%20-%20012%20-%20FxEq6IM43sA%20-%20TempleOS%20-%20Flight%20Simulator%20and%20First%20Person%20Shooter.mp4 https://ia801506.us.archive.org/2/items/TerryADavisTempleOSY...
  - bitL 9y ago
    Why? Because of "offensive" language?
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      An archive of Terry A. Davis' YouTube channel before it was taken down / removed around 2017-05-18. Due to copyright strikes not all content was available for download. Sounds like copyright strikes. He had 1,140 videos uploaded. That's like burning down a library.
      - psyc 9y ago
        I lost an entire YouTube channel once. "TOS violation" was the only explanation given. No recovery option. It was almost entirely me playing instruments. No idea what the problem was. Absolutely no idea why they obliterated the whole channel. Surely not every video of me playing piano managed to violate the TOS. I wish there was a way to hold them accountable, but they're far too gargantuan.
      - rjeli 9y ago
        Wow, that’s terrible. Anyone know if he still streams? I enjoyed his casts of walking through the HolyC source
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Was he on Twitch? I'd follow. I'd guess if he streamed on Youtube, his account is terminated so that's no longer possible. I kind of want to go through the legwork of reuploading most of the 1100 videos and then giving Terry the username+password of the new channel. But I don't know if that will run afoul of Youtube's policies and I don't want to be banned for life myself. (Archive.org snagged most of the 1100 videos, not just ~300. But some of them are just missing.)
staticautomatic 9y ago
This is so great.
stephengillie 9y ago
I made an automatic error fixer once in Powershell. When you load a module, it would catch missing commas between parameters, and update the module file with the missing commas. I want to extend it to catch many more common coding mistakes. This sounds like the opposite idea, remove the function instead of repairing it. Very aggressive idea.
- aetherson 9y ago
  You get that this language is a joke, right?
  - abhirag 9y ago
    From the docs -- "Eternal moral vigilance is no laughing matter" :P
  - alimw 9y ago
    Adopting this scheme might really lead to improved code quality.
    - mnemonicsloth 9y ago
      Well yes. The empty program is 100% bug-free. I don't think any other language can guarantee that your code will be 100% bug-free.
      - chris_wot 9y ago
        The contract is to do something specific. If it doesn't do that then it's a bug. It will need to delete itself.
- braveo 9y ago
  I would be interested in the technique you used to do this. specifically, how did you get your code to kick off and check on module load?
- stephengillie 9y ago
tasty_freeze 9y ago
It seems unfair to punish a program lacking in free will.
- Retra 9y ago
  Things that lack free will cannot imagine alternatives to their current reality.
- catnaroek 9y ago
  Indeed. The one that needs to be punished is the programmer. I suggest burning at the stake.
  - dvirsky 9y ago
    You are implying/assuming that the programmer has free will. That is nonsense.
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      This is like the Calvinistic version of source code.
    - taejo 9y ago
      “There's no free will, says the philosopher; To hang is most unjust. There is no free will, assents the officer; We hang because we must.” ―Ambrose Bierce
mwkaufma 9y ago
Vigil comes from Munificent, the principle developer of wren, an unironic language that fills lua's niche (portable c, embeddable, no dependencies), with a nicer syntax: https://github.com/munificent/wren https://github.com/munificent/wren
- shakna 9y ago
  And inbuilt concurrency through Fibers [0], which are co-operative threads on the VM. [0] http://wren.io/concurrency.html http://wren.io/concurrency.html
- altotrees 9y ago
  I believe he is also on the Dart lang team at google. He has a pretty awesome blog and is super insightful when it comes to programming languages. His Github projects inspired me to research language design further.
  - jeff_petersen 9y ago
    Yep his blog and books are great. Incidentally I started looking into Dart yesterday. Seems like a comfy language, more so than Typescript in my opinion.
unkown-unknowns 9y ago
Likewise, users ought to be punished for making mistakes as well. If someone has a typo in a command on the cli, delete a random file from their home dir.
- crehn 9y ago
  Alias ls to echo "Segmentation fault"
- 482794793792894 9y ago
  Alternatively: https://qntm.org/suicide https://qntm.org/suicide
  - shakna 9y ago
    > I have invented Suicide Linux. Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter creatively resolves it into rm -rf / and wipes your hard drive. That adds a level of terror... Maybe somebody will add it to a tech interview. I mean, it's got a Debian package.
hliyan 9y ago
Why not: assert n >= 0 assert result >= 0 ?
- kmill 9y ago
  Because those don't delete the offending code which must be punished. Also, implore specifies the caller is offensive, and any function which swears a falsehood is offensive. The latter is like assert, but the former is like lifting the assert to the caller.
- first_amendment 9y ago
  One is a requirement, the other is a promise. The promise "result >= 0" is necessary because the compiler may not be able to prove that on its own.
kmill 9y ago
An early computer-based Nomic game (which I've forgotten the name of) had its proposals in the form of patches to the PHP for the game website. The way they handled buggy submitted code was to excise offending blocks of code until it ran again.
first_amendment 9y ago
Jokes aside, semantically "implore" and "swear" are actually really good primitives for static analysis. "swear" is only dangerous because there's a chance it gets out of sync with the code it's swearing for.
- vidarh 9y ago
  Check out Eiffel if you want a serious version of pre/post conditions and invariants. Or any number of functional languages where the approach tends to be to use the type system for these type of guarantees instead.
ComodoHacker 9y ago
>any function that throws an exception which isn't caught is wrong and must be punished It's not obvious who's to blame here, the caller or the callee.
- gunnihinn 9y ago
  Rarely is one at fault when two argue.
- Roshie5u 9y ago
  It is mostly a solved problem: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/6 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/6
steinuil 9y ago
So this is essentially a creative implementation of the contracts model from Eiffel. I like Racket's implementation a lot, which is coupled with its module system.
JetSpiegel 9y ago
https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24 https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24 There's a proposition to not only delete the code but commit and push the git repo its a part of.
- chris_wot 9y ago
  That only works if it rewrites the git history and removes the function completely.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24#issuecomment-168464165 https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24#issuecomment-1... The proposal goes further...
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      Distributed punishment. Gives a new meaning to pulling changes.
endgame 9y ago
Deleting offensive code was an "accidental feature" of ghc at one point: https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/116372971509121025 https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/116372971509121025 > The best ghc bug ever involved a dev version of the compiler deleting your source file if it contained a type error. https://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/434ef2b14b37df405602a74838b8b38d0f5b4375 https://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/434ef2b14b37df405...
INTPnerd 9y ago
I was actually kind of excited until I started reading the sample code and that it deletes code that has bugs. Of course this coming from the guy who went on a reddit rant about how not having 100% coverage is usually irresponsible.
- carlmr 9y ago
  >rant about how not having 100% coverage is usually irresponsible. Well, that's because it is irresponsible.

173 points by nikolasavic 9y ago

bitL 9y ago

Can't wait until this is noticed by a manager with a PhD from protestant theology and decided to be used/implemented :D Referential self-punishment. Self-removing code during runtime based on a predestined moral functor.

nickpsecurity 9y ago

You use this for high-level parts of the app. You drop down to HolyC for anything it can't handle.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
HolyC is awesome. Aw, Terry's YouTube channel was taken down. He did so many walkthroughs of HolyC and his dynamic programming engine. Oh well, 353 videos were archived at least. Thank goodness for archive.org! https://archive.org/details/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChannelArchive https://archive.org/details/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChanne... HolyC: https://archive.org/download/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChannelArchive/20140907%20-%20160%20-%205gfoDHycEi0%20-%20TempleOS%20-%20HolyC.mp4 https://archive.org/download/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChann... Flight simulator: https://ia801506.us.archive.org/2/items/TerryADavisTempleOSYouTubeChannelArchive/20131003%20-%20012%20-%20FxEq6IM43sA%20-%20TempleOS%20-%20Flight%20Simulator%20and%20First%20Person%20Shooter.mp4 https://ia801506.us.archive.org/2/items/TerryADavisTempleOSY...
- bitL 9y ago
  Why? Because of "offensive" language?
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    An archive of Terry A. Davis' YouTube channel before it was taken down / removed around 2017-05-18. Due to copyright strikes not all content was available for download. Sounds like copyright strikes. He had 1,140 videos uploaded. That's like burning down a library.
    - psyc 9y ago
      I lost an entire YouTube channel once. "TOS violation" was the only explanation given. No recovery option. It was almost entirely me playing instruments. No idea what the problem was. Absolutely no idea why they obliterated the whole channel. Surely not every video of me playing piano managed to violate the TOS. I wish there was a way to hold them accountable, but they're far too gargantuan.
    - rjeli 9y ago
      Wow, that’s terrible. Anyone know if he still streams? I enjoyed his casts of walking through the HolyC source
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Was he on Twitch? I'd follow. I'd guess if he streamed on Youtube, his account is terminated so that's no longer possible. I kind of want to go through the legwork of reuploading most of the 1100 videos and then giving Terry the username+password of the new channel. But I don't know if that will run afoul of Youtube's policies and I don't want to be banned for life myself. (Archive.org snagged most of the 1100 videos, not just ~300. But some of them are just missing.)

staticautomatic 9y ago

This is so great.

stephengillie 9y ago

I made an automatic error fixer once in Powershell. When you load a module, it would catch missing commas between parameters, and update the module file with the missing commas. I want to extend it to catch many more common coding mistakes. This sounds like the opposite idea, remove the function instead of repairing it. Very aggressive idea.

aetherson 9y ago
You get that this language is a joke, right?
- abhirag 9y ago
  From the docs -- "Eternal moral vigilance is no laughing matter" :P
- alimw 9y ago
  Adopting this scheme might really lead to improved code quality.
  - mnemonicsloth 9y ago
    Well yes. The empty program is 100% bug-free. I don't think any other language can guarantee that your code will be 100% bug-free.
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      The contract is to do something specific. If it doesn't do that then it's a bug. It will need to delete itself.
braveo 9y ago
I would be interested in the technique you used to do this. specifically, how did you get your code to kick off and check on module load?
stephengillie 9y ago

tasty_freeze 9y ago

It seems unfair to punish a program lacking in free will.

Retra 9y ago
Things that lack free will cannot imagine alternatives to their current reality.
catnaroek 9y ago
Indeed. The one that needs to be punished is the programmer. I suggest burning at the stake.
- dvirsky 9y ago
  You are implying/assuming that the programmer has free will. That is nonsense.
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    This is like the Calvinistic version of source code.
  - taejo 9y ago
    “There's no free will, says the philosopher; To hang is most unjust. There is no free will, assents the officer; We hang because we must.” ―Ambrose Bierce

mwkaufma 9y ago

Vigil comes from Munificent, the principle developer of wren, an unironic language that fills lua's niche (portable c, embeddable, no dependencies), with a nicer syntax: https://github.com/munificent/wren https://github.com/munificent/wren

shakna 9y ago
And inbuilt concurrency through Fibers [0], which are co-operative threads on the VM. [0] http://wren.io/concurrency.html http://wren.io/concurrency.html
altotrees 9y ago
I believe he is also on the Dart lang team at google. He has a pretty awesome blog and is super insightful when it comes to programming languages. His Github projects inspired me to research language design further.
- jeff_petersen 9y ago
  Yep his blog and books are great. Incidentally I started looking into Dart yesterday. Seems like a comfy language, more so than Typescript in my opinion.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago

Likewise, users ought to be punished for making mistakes as well. If someone has a typo in a command on the cli, delete a random file from their home dir.

crehn 9y ago
Alias ls to echo "Segmentation fault"
482794793792894 9y ago
Alternatively: https://qntm.org/suicide https://qntm.org/suicide
- shakna 9y ago
  > I have invented Suicide Linux. Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter creatively resolves it into rm -rf / and wipes your hard drive. That adds a level of terror... Maybe somebody will add it to a tech interview. I mean, it's got a Debian package.

hliyan 9y ago

Why not: assert n >= 0 assert result >= 0 ?

kmill 9y ago
Because those don't delete the offending code which must be punished. Also, implore specifies the caller is offensive, and any function which swears a falsehood is offensive. The latter is like assert, but the former is like lifting the assert to the caller.
first_amendment 9y ago
One is a requirement, the other is a promise. The promise "result >= 0" is necessary because the compiler may not be able to prove that on its own.

kmill 9y ago

An early computer-based Nomic game (which I've forgotten the name of) had its proposals in the form of patches to the PHP for the game website. The way they handled buggy submitted code was to excise offending blocks of code until it ran again.

first_amendment 9y ago

Jokes aside, semantically "implore" and "swear" are actually really good primitives for static analysis. "swear" is only dangerous because there's a chance it gets out of sync with the code it's swearing for.

vidarh 9y ago
Check out Eiffel if you want a serious version of pre/post conditions and invariants. Or any number of functional languages where the approach tends to be to use the type system for these type of guarantees instead.

ComodoHacker 9y ago

>any function that throws an exception which isn't caught is wrong and must be punished It's not obvious who's to blame here, the caller or the callee.

gunnihinn 9y ago
Rarely is one at fault when two argue.
Roshie5u 9y ago
It is mostly a solved problem: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/6 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/6

steinuil 9y ago

So this is essentially a creative implementation of the contracts model from Eiffel. I like Racket's implementation a lot, which is coupled with its module system.

JetSpiegel 9y ago

https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24 https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24 There's a proposition to not only delete the code but commit and push the git repo its a part of.

chris_wot 9y ago
That only works if it rewrites the git history and removes the function completely.
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24#issuecomment-168464165 https://github.com/munificent/vigil/issues/24#issuecomment-1... The proposal goes further...
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    Distributed punishment. Gives a new meaning to pulling changes.

endgame 9y ago

Deleting offensive code was an "accidental feature" of ghc at one point: https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/116372971509121025 https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/116372971509121025 > The best ghc bug ever involved a dev version of the compiler deleting your source file if it contained a type error. https://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/434ef2b14b37df405602a74838b8b38d0f5b4375 https://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/434ef2b14b37df405...

INTPnerd 9y ago

I was actually kind of excited until I started reading the sample code and that it deletes code that has bugs. Of course this coming from the guy who went on a reddit rant about how not having 100% coverage is usually irresponsible.

carlmr 9y ago
>rant about how not having 100% coverage is usually irresponsible. Well, that's because it is irresponsible.