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With unique types and offering an alternative to monadic approach to pure functional programming, I always had an eye out for this language. I always found its

by srean 5y ago

With unique types and offering an alternative to monadic approach to pure functional programming, I always had an eye out for this language. I always found its syntax rather clean (no pun intended). Sadly there hasn't be much activity. or at least not much that could be discerned from its public facing website. I would love to see a revival in interest and development.

cies 5y ago
I'd love to learn some about the "alternative to monadic approach to pure functional programming" but the project's website is utterly useless in helping me to find it.
- jonsen 5y ago
  I remember a rather comprehensive online pdf manual/book back in '99 when I went Clean for a period.
- gonoid 5y ago
  The documentation [1] has a bit of information about using uniqueness types for IO and other cases. [1] https://clean.cs.ru.nl/download/html_report/CleanRep.2.2_11.htm#_Uniqueness_Typing https://clean.cs.ru.nl/download/html_report/CleanRep.2.2_11....
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  Clean has used uniqueness types since the 80s. Monadic effects were only discovered/implemented in the 90s. In fact, Haskell 1.0 didn't have monadic I/O either; AFAIK it implemented I/O using a "stream of actions", but that doesn't compose very well (e.g. we can get deadlocked if an earlier action depends on the result of a later action) Uniqueness types are similar to to linear types (as found in Idris, ATS, and recently Haskell), and similar to Rust's 'ownership' model ("affine types"?)
wakeupcall 5y ago
If I'm not mistaken, wasn't Clean closed source and commercial for a long time? I was very interested years ago, but I kept on thinking that without opening up it would eventually just fade into oblivion and never went beyond the toying phase. A common fate for the many languages with a single and commercial reference compiler/interpreter.
- srean 5y ago
  I seem to recall the same (of it being closed source initially)

by srean 5y ago

cies 5y ago

I'd love to learn some about the "alternative to monadic approach to pure functional programming" but the project's website is utterly useless in helping me to find it.

jonsen 5y ago
I remember a rather comprehensive online pdf manual/book back in '99 when I went Clean for a period.
gonoid 5y ago
The documentation [1] has a bit of information about using uniqueness types for IO and other cases. [1] https://clean.cs.ru.nl/download/html_report/CleanRep.2.2_11.htm#_Uniqueness_Typing https://clean.cs.ru.nl/download/html_report/CleanRep.2.2_11....
chriswarbo 5y ago
Clean has used uniqueness types since the 80s. Monadic effects were only discovered/implemented in the 90s. In fact, Haskell 1.0 didn't have monadic I/O either; AFAIK it implemented I/O using a "stream of actions", but that doesn't compose very well (e.g. we can get deadlocked if an earlier action depends on the result of a later action) Uniqueness types are similar to to linear types (as found in Idris, ATS, and recently Haskell), and similar to Rust's 'ownership' model ("affine types"?)

wakeupcall 5y ago

If I'm not mistaken, wasn't Clean closed source and commercial for a long time? I was very interested years ago, but I kept on thinking that without opening up it would eventually just fade into oblivion and never went beyond the toying phase. A common fate for the many languages with a single and commercial reference compiler/interpreter.

srean 5y ago
I seem to recall the same (of it being closed source initially)