7 ms·

The Ecstasy Programming Language Targets Cloud-Native Computing

42 points by chhum 7y ago

tim58 7y ago
I spent a good five minutes on the article and didn't see any actual code. It is sacrilege to introduce a new programming language without even a "Hello World." I love the name, and I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me enough to convert me into a believer now.
- macintux 7y ago
  In fairness, that’s an interview, not an introduction.
- adonese 7y ago
  From their blog https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html
- cpurdy 7y ago
  > "I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me enough to convert me into a believer now." Hi Tim - I think that's a good thing at this stage. We aren't ready to have a large number of developers actually programming _with_ Ecstasy today. What we're looking for is feedback, ideas for improvement, criticism (constructive, please), and -- for those engineers who love this kind of project -- contributors. What I'm personally worried about is having someone try to use it, as if it's as mature as a production-quality language, and walk away upset that they wasted their valuable time on something that is still being developed. (I value my own time, and I try to consciously and conscientiously value the time of others; that seems only fair.) So we're still at a stage where most of the industry should ignore the language, except perhaps to steal any ideas that they think would help in their own day-to-day jobs. Each week that passes, the language matures slightly, and at some point (with a production-ready runtime that we haven't yet built), we will have a language that is worthy of people's time. As someone else pointed out, there is a Hello World example at https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html ... but the automation of getting started just isn't there yet. In other words, having to download and configure a specific IDE to run a "Hello World" is not a great way to introduce a language to someone interested in just kicking the tires and checking things out. We do have someone who has volunteered to simplify this particular "getting started" process, but that project isn't going to get going for another month or so (because like many of the people helping us, he has a day job).
philips 7y ago
I think this is the official blog / docs at the moment https://xtclang.blogspot.com/ https://xtclang.blogspot.com/
- cpurdy 7y ago
  Yes, the xtclang.org site redirects there for the time being. (It's a lot easier to maintain a reasonable-looking landing page on blogspot than on github.) Peace, Cameron.
fake-name 7y ago
Hey look, another programming language shitting the bed by virtue of terrible naming. If you're not google, name your garbage something without 2 million existing google results.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  While I too am frustrated at all the languages out there with common names which yield too many false positives in search results, you're really not going to convince many people by insulting them.. especially when some of the most popular and trendy languages in the world (like java, python, ruby, go) have really common names. Honestly, I don't know what could change this trend. Apparently, software authors care more about having a catchy name over an easily searchable one.
  - phaedryx 7y ago
    To be fair, Java (1995), Python (1990), and Ruby (1995) were all created before Google (1998). In a time of search engines I think that more care should be taken for naming things. Clojure is an excellent example of Rich Hickey taking the time to think about the name.
  - bequestry 7y ago
    It's already the name of a popular drug that's been around for half a century, with signs pointing towards increasing usage and legalization. There's thousands of research papers on "Ecstasy" already, and millions of people searching for "tips on ecstasy" or "how to use ecstasy". Whomever named this language is a moron.
    - cpurdy 7y ago
      "Whomever [sic] named this language is a moron." That would be this moron. I would have chosen a different name, but they were all taken.
      - bequestry 7y ago
sansnomme 7y ago
Sounds like ballerina.io
hota_mazi 7y ago
Given how many features Ecstasy has that seem to come straight out of Kotlin and Ceylon, it's quite surprising to see Cameron write [1]: > I've never used Kotlin or Ceylon myself, but over the past few months I have had a chance to look at some of what they did, and I couldn't believe how many choices that they had made were very similar to things that we had done. I would hope that someone who decides to create a language would spend some time studying a lot of languages, especially those that came out in the past ten years. Additional posts state similar things [2]: > I've never gotten to work in either Smalltalk or Lisp and same for Haskell or OCaml. This makes me worried that Ecstasy is being created in a vacuum with little knowledge of the current and past state of the art. [1] https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-exception.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-exception.ht... [2] https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html
- haolez 7y ago
  By the way, is Ceylon still a thing? It looked so cool and well thought out, but I haven’t heard about it in a long while.
  - latchkey 7y ago
    Never got traction and was axed.
  - core-questions 7y ago
    It's called Sri Lanka now ;)
- z3t4 7y ago
  When learning a programming language; it takes several years to discover the deficiencies, after a few more years you can work around and avoid them. keep doing it several more years and you almost forget about them.
  - mncharity 7y ago
    >> someone who decides to create a language [...should] spend some time studying a lot of languages > When learning a programming language; it takes several years [for you] to discover the deficiencies A valid response. Also a sad commentary on our impoverished and siloed/balkanized professional literature and communities around programming language design and implementation.
Vaslo 7y ago
“I’m using ecstasy” will be interesting to hear around the office.
pasttense01 7y ago
One interesting statement: "Most of the companies that I have worked with over the past 25 years are spending 95% of their IT budget (and usually even higher!) just to keep old stuff running." This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best guess as to what the actual number is for companies in general?
- cpurdy 7y ago
  > "95% ... This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best guess as to what the actual number is for companies in general?" The numbers that managing directors have shared with me are much higher than that, and the only "official" number I've seen (years back) was also slightly higher than that (96%? 98%?), but when I tried to find the article (so that I could cite it), I failed to find it, so I made an unsubstantiated claim with an arbitrarily more conservative number. Please keep in mind that, at the time, I worked at Oracle, which is at least 23% responsible for taking that 95%+ of the IT budget. I carefully documented that here: https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost-for-a-company-like-Google/answer/Cameron-Purdy https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost-for-a-... (Please don't ask me to defend the 23% number; I just made it up to be humorous.)

42 points by chhum 7y ago

I spent a good five minutes on the article and didn't see any actual code. It is sacrilege to introduce a new programming language without even a "Hello World." I love the name, and I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me enough to convert me into a believer now.

macintux 7y ago
In fairness, that’s an interview, not an introduction.
adonese 7y ago
From their blog https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html
cpurdy 7y ago
> "I love the concepts talked about, but you didn't give me enough to convert me into a believer now." Hi Tim - I think that's a good thing at this stage. We aren't ready to have a large number of developers actually programming _with_ Ecstasy today. What we're looking for is feedback, ideas for improvement, criticism (constructive, please), and -- for those engineers who love this kind of project -- contributors. What I'm personally worried about is having someone try to use it, as if it's as mature as a production-quality language, and walk away upset that they wasted their valuable time on something that is still being developed. (I value my own time, and I try to consciously and conscientiously value the time of others; that seems only fair.) So we're still at a stage where most of the industry should ignore the language, except perhaps to steal any ideas that they think would help in their own day-to-day jobs. Each week that passes, the language matures slightly, and at some point (with a production-ready runtime that we haven't yet built), we will have a language that is worthy of people's time. As someone else pointed out, there is a Hello World example at https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/08/hello-world.html ... but the automation of getting started just isn't there yet. In other words, having to download and configure a specific IDE to run a "Hello World" is not a great way to introduce a language to someone interested in just kicking the tires and checking things out. We do have someone who has volunteered to simplify this particular "getting started" process, but that project isn't going to get going for another month or so (because like many of the people helping us, he has a day job).

philips 7y ago

I think this is the official blog / docs at the moment https://xtclang.blogspot.com/ https://xtclang.blogspot.com/

cpurdy 7y ago
Yes, the xtclang.org site redirects there for the time being. (It's a lot easier to maintain a reasonable-looking landing page on blogspot than on github.) Peace, Cameron.

fake-name 7y ago

Hey look, another programming language shitting the bed by virtue of terrible naming. If you're not google, name your garbage something without 2 million existing google results.

pmoriarty 7y ago
While I too am frustrated at all the languages out there with common names which yield too many false positives in search results, you're really not going to convince many people by insulting them.. especially when some of the most popular and trendy languages in the world (like java, python, ruby, go) have really common names. Honestly, I don't know what could change this trend. Apparently, software authors care more about having a catchy name over an easily searchable one.
- phaedryx 7y ago
  To be fair, Java (1995), Python (1990), and Ruby (1995) were all created before Google (1998). In a time of search engines I think that more care should be taken for naming things. Clojure is an excellent example of Rich Hickey taking the time to think about the name.
- bequestry 7y ago
  It's already the name of a popular drug that's been around for half a century, with signs pointing towards increasing usage and legalization. There's thousands of research papers on "Ecstasy" already, and millions of people searching for "tips on ecstasy" or "how to use ecstasy". Whomever named this language is a moron.
  - cpurdy 7y ago
    "Whomever [sic] named this language is a moron." That would be this moron. I would have chosen a different name, but they were all taken.
    - bequestry 7y ago

sansnomme 7y ago

Sounds like ballerina.io

hota_mazi 7y ago

Given how many features Ecstasy has that seem to come straight out of Kotlin and Ceylon, it's quite surprising to see Cameron write [1]: > I've never used Kotlin or Ceylon myself, but over the past few months I have had a chance to look at some of what they did, and I couldn't believe how many choices that they had made were very similar to things that we had done. I would hope that someone who decides to create a language would spend some time studying a lot of languages, especially those that came out in the past ten years. Additional posts state similar things [2]: > I've never gotten to work in either Smalltalk or Lisp and same for Haskell or OCaml. This makes me worried that Ecstasy is being created in a vacuum with little knowledge of the current and past state of the art. [1] https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-exception.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/null-is-no-exception.ht... [2] https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html https://xtclang.blogspot.com/2019/07/composition.html

haolez 7y ago
By the way, is Ceylon still a thing? It looked so cool and well thought out, but I haven’t heard about it in a long while.
- latchkey 7y ago
  Never got traction and was axed.
- core-questions 7y ago
  It's called Sri Lanka now ;)
z3t4 7y ago
When learning a programming language; it takes several years to discover the deficiencies, after a few more years you can work around and avoid them. keep doing it several more years and you almost forget about them.
- mncharity 7y ago
  >> someone who decides to create a language [...should] spend some time studying a lot of languages > When learning a programming language; it takes several years [for you] to discover the deficiencies A valid response. Also a sad commentary on our impoverished and siloed/balkanized professional literature and communities around programming language design and implementation.

Vaslo 7y ago

“I’m using ecstasy” will be interesting to hear around the office.

pasttense01 7y ago

One interesting statement: "Most of the companies that I have worked with over the past 25 years are spending 95% of their IT budget (and usually even higher!) just to keep old stuff running." This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best guess as to what the actual number is for companies in general?

cpurdy 7y ago
> "95% ... This is an awfully high number. Anyone care to give their best guess as to what the actual number is for companies in general?" The numbers that managing directors have shared with me are much higher than that, and the only "official" number I've seen (years back) was also slightly higher than that (96%? 98%?), but when I tried to find the article (so that I could cite it), I failed to find it, so I made an unsubstantiated claim with an arbitrarily more conservative number. Please keep in mind that, at the time, I worked at Oracle, which is at least 23% responsible for taking that 95%+ of the IT budget. I carefully documented that here: https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost-for-a-company-like-Google/answer/Cameron-Purdy https://www.quora.com/What-would-Oracle-database-cost-for-a-... (Please don't ask me to defend the 23% number; I just made it up to be humorous.)