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The Emerald Programming Language
- TooBrokeToBeg 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_(programming_language)
- megaman22 8y agoI wish more websites looked like this. And weighed 5kb of HTML.
- tcfunk 8y agoPreferably with a bit less green.
- dangerbird2 8y agoBlue text on dark green background is not very colorblind friendly. Even if you don't use fancy javascript or css, a strong colorscheme with proper contrast does wonders.
- TylerE 8y agoBlue on green isn't anything except headache-friendly.
- overcast 8y agoGood god, I hope not. Can we just standardize with black on white?
- contravariant 8y agoOr rather black on off-white with generous margins.
- igouy 8y agoA little colour breaks the monotony. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/ https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/
- theyinwhy 8y agoThe impression the page design had on me was highly different. Does the developer really want me to use the language? If so, why not invest only a bit amount of time in thinking about it's presentation?
- megaman22 8y agoThis is pretty clearly an archival site. The links under "Current (more-or-less) Emerald information" point to a university site updated in 1998 and a mothballed Sourceforge repo with no activity since 2005.
- jhomedall 8y agoWith even a tiny bit of CSS (which can be inlined in the head tag if you don't want an extra fetch), you end up with this: https://jmn.link/css-example.jpg https://jmn.link/css-example.jpg . That's 152 bytes of non-minified CSS to accomplish that. Going further, if you drop the table-based layout, then you can get something equally as small, that doesn't break horribly on mobile. Of course, none of this was really an option when this page was created (look at the age of all the links in it).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maxfurman 8y agoI don't understand the example program at the top right. What does it do?
- dmix 8y agoI believe it's a play on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
- blueish 8y agoFrom my memory, creates an object, gets all the other active nodes in the cluster, moves them to that node and then back to the original node, showcasing the object passing feature of the language.
- rubberbuckaneer 8y agoIt moves the Kilroy object around all the active nodes in the cluster, and then back to the origin node at the end.
- masklinn 8y agoIt moves the running object/process between nodes (vms/machines) of a cluster, then back to the origin nodes.
- blueish 8y agoI recently took a compilers course from Hutchinson, and he talked a bit about the design behind object passing in Emerald from a compilers point of view, how once you have garbage collection, it's easy to implement moving objects between nodes of programs. Interesting concept that I was surprised to find wasn't as commonplace!
- all2well 8y agoOne issue is that at scale, communication costs dwarf almost every other cost. So, sending objects between nodes isn't as critical as you might think it is for distributed systems. (I was also in Norm's class! It was awesome, and also got me over the Rust hype to some degree)
- dpc_pw 8y ago> also got me over the Rust hype to some degree You can't just throw a detail like that and not tell us more. :D
- StavrosK 8y agoI guess he means that you don't need speed for distributed applications, which is a bit misquided because nobody said you did, and that's not what Rust claims to do well.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago> communication costs dwarf almost every other cost. That may have been true 10 or 20 years ago when networking was much slower.
- ljw1001 8y agoits still true because everything else is faster, too
- bunderbunder 8y agoEverything else was much slower, too. Oftentimes the biggest cost associated with communication is latency, and the one thing that hasn't changed over the past few decades is the speed of light.
- asdsa5325 8y agoThe color scheme is awful.
- hota_mazi 8y agoAgreed, really wonder why they picked that bright emerald green.
- sleepybrett 8y agobecause it was 1991 and most people were probably seeing grey on the xterms in the ACC anyways.
- oh_sigh 8y agoWell, the programming language is called Emerald... But really, they didn't pick emerald, they picked 'screamin green'(#55ff55) Emerald(#50C878) would have been a much better choice(but still a bad one)
- hota_mazi 8y agoThat was kind of my joke. Which another responder missed.
- dang 8y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- akrasuski1 8y agoLooks like jewellery is popular in language namimng: we've got Ruby, Crystal, now Emerald...
- toasterlovin 8y agoDon't forget Perl, who (I think) started this trend.
- macjohnmcc 8y agoEventually someone will have to settle for Cubic Zirconia.
- gweinberg 8y agoLet's hope nobody ever names a language red-on-green.
- Barrin92 8y agoEver since I've visited Larry Wall's homepage for the first time(http://www.wall.org/~larry/ http://www.wall.org/~larry/) I don't think anything can shock me anymore.
- s_ngularity 8y agoThis is another gem of weird internet design. Note especially the animations on hovering over images, and color choices on some of the linked pages. It somehow sort of works though. http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/ http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/
- mchahn 8y agoMy eyes! My eyes!
- DoreenMichele 8y agoIf they want to be thematic, they should make the word Emerald in emerald green, which this background is not. Readability should not be sacrificed for some theme or branding dealie.
- codingdave 8y agoThat design has been in place for over 10 years. I don't think modern design is on anyone's radar. At all.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoAh. Okay.
- cross_wiber 8y agoMost of the comments seem to be about the page design, for a page that was probably created in the 90s. Nevertheless, Emerald the language is pretty fascinating, and way ahead of its time (it was developed in the mid to late 80s). They had strong static typing, including getting co-/contravariance right a decade before Java got it wrong! It was the first object-oriented language that I know of to have a statically-typed structural type system. In fact, the technique that Go uses to implement dynamic dispatch was independently invented 20 years earlier in Emerald. And its objects were mobile, which very few languages even today attempt.
- dmix 8y ago> And its objects were mobile, which very few languages even today attempt. Can you explain what you mean by that? FYI I vouched for your comment, it was [dead] for some reason. But I found it relevant and interesting.
- cross_wiber 8y agoEmerald objects can move from one node to another. So, for example, if an object on machine X wants to perform computation using data on some remote machine Y, the object can move to Y and have (fast, local) access to Y's data, then move back to X when it is done. So the computations themselves are mobile. This required some cleverness in the implementation, because a process's stack might even be split between multiple machines (I might be remembering that wrong).
- jonathanstrange 8y agoThe code snippet on the page looks incredibly clean and readable, exactly how I wish modern languages would look like. Too bad Algol-style syntax is no longer used that often (except for Delphi).
- beders 8y agoI love those older articles. Among other things, they also show how we keep reinventing the wheels (with slightly different paint jobs). Our biggest achievement nowadays seems to be clients asking for data in the shape preferred by the client - with data being in a primitive tree like format with anemic types. Or a bit more complicated neural nets. We still haven't moved beyond van neumann architectures.
- himom 8y agoDoes anyone know of solid intro/intermediate/advanted compiler design/implementation MOOC’s?
- dmix 8y agoThis seems to be a pretty good overview: http://www.emeraldprogramminglanguage.org/TSE-1991-paper.pdf http://www.emeraldprogramminglanguage.org/TSE-1991-paper.pdf But it hasn't seen much use outside of the 1980s in academia. I doubt you'll find much on it.
- stesch 8y agoThis bike shed needs another color.