28 ms·

Holonforth

93 points by eterps 4y ago

iLoveOncall 4y ago
Titles like this are worst than clickbait. It should be mandatory to have descriptive titles on HN. To save everyone a click: "The Holonforth programming systems combine browser, editor and umbilical target link. And in the DOS systems also: assembler, compiler, linker, debugger and interpreter." I would literally rather have the title be "This programming system is going to change the world and put you out of a job if you don't learn it" rather than some random name.
- dang 4y ago
  "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
n4r9 4y ago
If anyone like me is confused by the term "CMS", my guess is that it means "Content Management System": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system
- helf 4y ago
  Or… /Code/ Management System! .. yeah I have no idea. I barely glanced at this and I immediately thought of Content Management System and then had nightmare flashbacks to when I had to admin web servers running Wordpress and Whatever and ran away
IgorPartola 4y ago
This is a neat idea. I think it could be a tool that really shapes the workflow for a programmer and the way we think about writing code. Think about it: we have this loose correlation between a module and a text file. But you could conceptually put two module’s worth of concepts into one file. Or split a single module between two files. That looseness leads to code that is hard to understand and manage. If the UI you use forces you to work on one unit of the program at a time you are much less likely to create the Monster Function of Doom or 1000 modules that don’t do anything but provide indirection. I think UI usability may suffer a bit but a well designed IDE of this sort could really transform how we think about software architecture.
denton-scratch 4y ago
So that's not new. There was an extended BASIC in the Sinclair QL that allowed you to browse units and functions in the left pane, and edit the code in the right pane. Before that, there was a system on the Burroughs B20 series that had a similar design; browse on the left, edit on the right. Yeah, I approve of non-linear code editors.
- joshu 4y ago
  iirc the mentioned smalltalk browser predates both of these.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Correct, the Burroughs B20 is from 01982, the Sinclair QL is from 01984, and Smalltalk's class browser (pictured on the HolonForth page and cited in the text as a key inspiration) was already more or less in its current form in 01976, the biggest difference from today being that the screen was one bit per pixel, not grayscale or color. (The Smalltalk language and virtual machine have changed enormously, but the browser is almost unchanged.) I think Smalltalk-72 did not have the browser.
omnibrain 4y ago
Thats how the SAP ABAP Workbench works. A hierarchical view of your programs, classes, functions, etc. on the left. The root node is where you started, so if you just open a class, you get the eveything that belongs to that class, but you can also open a whole namespace. On the right you can then edit the code. https://help.sap.com/saphelp_gbt10/helpdata/EN/46/9d783e3a7d371ae10000000a11466f/TEMPLATE_image002.gif https://help.sap.com/saphelp_gbt10/helpdata/EN/46/9d783e3a7d... The syntax of ABAP may be not tho everyone's taste (modern ABAP looks better though), but the capabilities to write business software in a completely integrated system are magical. The database is "just there". SQL to access the DB is a first class citizen of the language. Your datatypes are the same in the database and your programs. You can use the primitive datatypes to create rich datatypes with attached default values and validation logic. When you build a input field in the GUI and connect it to the database field everything just works. That makes me really miss working with SAP.
- progre 4y ago
  That's also how Microsoft Dynamics Classic works, only its horrible.
- kragen 4y ago
  How are ABAP's capabilities for abstractions and static typing? I think those matter a lot more than syntax. Can you write, for example, a quickselect function that operates on an array of some arbitrary type with a user-defined ordering, or on an abstract indexable container? Can the type system guarantee that a subroutine can't modify a data structure you pass it a reference to? (Of course there's lots of "business software" that doesn't need this kind of thing.)
  - GianFabien 4y ago
    ABAP is used in the ERP systems domain. Once you try to do things outside of those abstractions it becomes difficult or even impossible. This is what basically suffocated the 4GLs of the 1990s. They were too constrained and at the edges problems tend to require unanticipated functionality. It is the non-functional requirements that cause the most implementation problems.
MisterTea 4y ago
This is how IEC 61131-3 is structured in automation vendor IDE's. Thanks to decades of brain damage many of the IDE's don't deal with textual source code but proprietary binary project files and you click to create POU's, progrm organizational units. Want to write a function? You have to click to create it as a POU and work on the code in a new window. In some IDE's the POU is even plit into a local variable window and a code window. Awful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61131-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61131-3
drivers99 4y ago
One thing about forth in a linear file is you can define a word (word is the forth term for subroutine or function), use it in another word, and redefine the word to something else after that without affecting the previous word. (Generally the word list (dictionary) is just a linked list and you search by starting from the newest word.) So I'm curious how the hierarchical words are stored and in what order they are searched.
- Someone 4y ago
  One thing about forths is that you can easily change that if you want. The simplest way to handle this is by patching the old word to jump to the new definition. If it bothers you that that leaves junk around, you can write words that compact the dictionary. Alternatively, if you have malloc/free, it’s easy to change the dictionary to be a list of pointers to malloced word definitions, and, when defining a word whose name matches that of an already existing word, to update that pointer to point to the new definition, and then cleanup the old definition by freeing its memory. That may fragment your heap, though, and may affect performance.
  - drivers99 4y ago
    I wasn't saying that redefining words was a bad thing. It's actually great. I'm just wondering how it works in Holonforth. I checked their guide as well.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
This principle was very well used in Smalltalk's IDE in its Class Hierarchy Browser. Some other languages can exploit it too. And some clever web-based REPLs approximate decently to it. I'd love to see this idea growing outside the Smalltalk world because is very valuable and influential to the DX (developer experience). I vaguely remember seeing it in IBM's Visual Age for Java in the early 2000's.
- g051051 4y ago
  > I vaguely remember seeing it in IBM's Visual Age for Java in the early 2000's. Yes, it was pretty amazing.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    I've heard it was implemented in Visual Age Smalltalk.
    - g051051 4y ago
      Yes, and it ran Java on their "Universal Virtual Machine": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32433429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32433429
- pasc1878 4y ago
  You can use this view of java code in Eclipse as well. But VAJ was still better.
  - sebastianconcpt 4y ago
    Better in what? Refactoring tools or? Oh, if I'm recalling correctly, it had workspace for live scripting and it could inspect the objects returned by snippets as Smalltalk could?
- HelloNurse 4y ago
  I've actually used Visual Age for Java, and its "repository" was an existential threat. It was basically incompatible with revision control (a gigantic binary blob) and it could be corrupted, for example (true story) by exceeding some maximum repository file size.
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
You lose the ability to use a 3rd party editor, traditional source control, grep and various other small command line tools. Also god forbid if the database is corrupted during a crash or sudden power loss.
- eterps 4y ago
  Good point! Image based programming systems should be mountable as a filesystem to alleviate some of these concerns IMO.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    But then you've just reinvented storing code in files, poorly. Why not do the opposite -- have code live in files, index them and overlay a hierarchical browser on top?
    - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
      This is what we already have, but the problem is that hierarchical browser -> filesystem is a lossy process and you have to continually reindex the filesystem to maintain the browser. If the hierarchy is first-class and the files are derived, this is less of a problem because the source of truth is the same shape as the conceptual structure of the environment.
- bbqbbqbbq 4y ago
- pasc1878 4y ago
  But you gain the ability to use tools that understand the language or the underlying AST, they look at the structure rather than a context free view of text. You add the tools to the IDE. As for database corruption - that is a well known issue databases have good resilience to crashes and power losses
  - derekzhouzhen 4y ago
ltbarcly3 4y ago
Looking at this tool, if I had to work in this environment the first thing I would do is figure out how to edit the files in Emacs. This looks extremely frustrating and painful and very much not compatible with how someone would need to use it to be productive. Imagine you have to jump between 3 functions for some reason, you have to go through this 4 level + deep hierarchy? Why? How does this help? There are lots of ways of organizing the world hierarchically, that you CAN do that does not mean it's helpful to do it, more `organized` does not imply better.
0xblood 4y ago
Neat, but not more. I prefer to define my own context (splitting into files as I see fit) and using code folding etc. which can achieve a similar result without fundamentally changing workflows (as others pointed out - editors, git, grep, ..). Each time you want to write a new function ("word" I guess) requires somewhat of a context switch as you have to navigate through a GUI to where it should go, where just swapping files in my editors buffers feel more naturally. But then again I have never tried working like this and maybe I'd have to try
95014_refugee 4y ago
This is another (interesting) spin on the language workbench / program as datastructure concept. Honestly, the problem is that people think they want faster horses. You see the usual banal comments here "what if the database crashes", "I just want to edit with Emacs", but no consideration (usually due to no exposure) of the upside of always having the program in a state that can be comprehended mechanically. It's unfortunate, because it ties us to maintaining and building programs like it's the 70s. For a fresher take on what this could enable if the general programming population were a bit less reactionary, consider the (sadly moribund) http://mbeddr.com http://mbeddr.com

93 points by eterps 4y ago

Titles like this are worst than clickbait. It should be mandatory to have descriptive titles on HN. To save everyone a click: "The Holonforth programming systems combine browser, editor and umbilical target link. And in the DOS systems also: assembler, compiler, linker, debugger and interpreter." I would literally rather have the title be "This programming system is going to change the world and put you out of a job if you don't learn it" rather than some random name.

dang 4y ago
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

n4r9 4y ago

If anyone like me is confused by the term "CMS", my guess is that it means "Content Management System": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

helf 4y ago
Or… /Code/ Management System! .. yeah I have no idea. I barely glanced at this and I immediately thought of Content Management System and then had nightmare flashbacks to when I had to admin web servers running Wordpress and Whatever and ran away

IgorPartola 4y ago

This is a neat idea. I think it could be a tool that really shapes the workflow for a programmer and the way we think about writing code. Think about it: we have this loose correlation between a module and a text file. But you could conceptually put two module’s worth of concepts into one file. Or split a single module between two files. That looseness leads to code that is hard to understand and manage. If the UI you use forces you to work on one unit of the program at a time you are much less likely to create the Monster Function of Doom or 1000 modules that don’t do anything but provide indirection. I think UI usability may suffer a bit but a well designed IDE of this sort could really transform how we think about software architecture.

denton-scratch 4y ago

So that's not new. There was an extended BASIC in the Sinclair QL that allowed you to browse units and functions in the left pane, and edit the code in the right pane. Before that, there was a system on the Burroughs B20 series that had a similar design; browse on the left, edit on the right. Yeah, I approve of non-linear code editors.

joshu 4y ago
iirc the mentioned smalltalk browser predates both of these.
- kragen 4y ago
  Correct, the Burroughs B20 is from 01982, the Sinclair QL is from 01984, and Smalltalk's class browser (pictured on the HolonForth page and cited in the text as a key inspiration) was already more or less in its current form in 01976, the biggest difference from today being that the screen was one bit per pixel, not grayscale or color. (The Smalltalk language and virtual machine have changed enormously, but the browser is almost unchanged.) I think Smalltalk-72 did not have the browser.

omnibrain 4y ago

Thats how the SAP ABAP Workbench works. A hierarchical view of your programs, classes, functions, etc. on the left. The root node is where you started, so if you just open a class, you get the eveything that belongs to that class, but you can also open a whole namespace. On the right you can then edit the code. https://help.sap.com/saphelp_gbt10/helpdata/EN/46/9d783e3a7d371ae10000000a11466f/TEMPLATE_image002.gif https://help.sap.com/saphelp_gbt10/helpdata/EN/46/9d783e3a7d... The syntax of ABAP may be not tho everyone's taste (modern ABAP looks better though), but the capabilities to write business software in a completely integrated system are magical. The database is "just there". SQL to access the DB is a first class citizen of the language. Your datatypes are the same in the database and your programs. You can use the primitive datatypes to create rich datatypes with attached default values and validation logic. When you build a input field in the GUI and connect it to the database field everything just works. That makes me really miss working with SAP.

progre 4y ago
That's also how Microsoft Dynamics Classic works, only its horrible.
kragen 4y ago
How are ABAP's capabilities for abstractions and static typing? I think those matter a lot more than syntax. Can you write, for example, a quickselect function that operates on an array of some arbitrary type with a user-defined ordering, or on an abstract indexable container? Can the type system guarantee that a subroutine can't modify a data structure you pass it a reference to? (Of course there's lots of "business software" that doesn't need this kind of thing.)
- GianFabien 4y ago
  ABAP is used in the ERP systems domain. Once you try to do things outside of those abstractions it becomes difficult or even impossible. This is what basically suffocated the 4GLs of the 1990s. They were too constrained and at the edges problems tend to require unanticipated functionality. It is the non-functional requirements that cause the most implementation problems.

MisterTea 4y ago

This is how IEC 61131-3 is structured in automation vendor IDE's. Thanks to decades of brain damage many of the IDE's don't deal with textual source code but proprietary binary project files and you click to create POU's, progrm organizational units. Want to write a function? You have to click to create it as a POU and work on the code in a new window. In some IDE's the POU is even plit into a local variable window and a code window. Awful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61131-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61131-3

drivers99 4y ago

One thing about forth in a linear file is you can define a word (word is the forth term for subroutine or function), use it in another word, and redefine the word to something else after that without affecting the previous word. (Generally the word list (dictionary) is just a linked list and you search by starting from the newest word.) So I'm curious how the hierarchical words are stored and in what order they are searched.

Someone 4y ago
One thing about forths is that you can easily change that if you want. The simplest way to handle this is by patching the old word to jump to the new definition. If it bothers you that that leaves junk around, you can write words that compact the dictionary. Alternatively, if you have malloc/free, it’s easy to change the dictionary to be a list of pointers to malloced word definitions, and, when defining a word whose name matches that of an already existing word, to update that pointer to point to the new definition, and then cleanup the old definition by freeing its memory. That may fragment your heap, though, and may affect performance.
- drivers99 4y ago
  I wasn't saying that redefining words was a bad thing. It's actually great. I'm just wondering how it works in Holonforth. I checked their guide as well.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

This principle was very well used in Smalltalk's IDE in its Class Hierarchy Browser. Some other languages can exploit it too. And some clever web-based REPLs approximate decently to it. I'd love to see this idea growing outside the Smalltalk world because is very valuable and influential to the DX (developer experience). I vaguely remember seeing it in IBM's Visual Age for Java in the early 2000's.

g051051 4y ago
> I vaguely remember seeing it in IBM's Visual Age for Java in the early 2000's. Yes, it was pretty amazing.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  I've heard it was implemented in Visual Age Smalltalk.
  - g051051 4y ago
    Yes, and it ran Java on their "Universal Virtual Machine": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32433429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32433429
pasc1878 4y ago
You can use this view of java code in Eclipse as well. But VAJ was still better.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  Better in what? Refactoring tools or? Oh, if I'm recalling correctly, it had workspace for live scripting and it could inspect the objects returned by snippets as Smalltalk could?
HelloNurse 4y ago
I've actually used Visual Age for Java, and its "repository" was an existential threat. It was basically incompatible with revision control (a gigantic binary blob) and it could be corrupted, for example (true story) by exceeding some maximum repository file size.

derekzhouzhen 4y ago

You lose the ability to use a 3rd party editor, traditional source control, grep and various other small command line tools. Also god forbid if the database is corrupted during a crash or sudden power loss.

eterps 4y ago
Good point! Image based programming systems should be mountable as a filesystem to alleviate some of these concerns IMO.
- bitwize 4y ago
  But then you've just reinvented storing code in files, poorly. Why not do the opposite -- have code live in files, index them and overlay a hierarchical browser on top?
  - fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
    This is what we already have, but the problem is that hierarchical browser -> filesystem is a lossy process and you have to continually reindex the filesystem to maintain the browser. If the hierarchy is first-class and the files are derived, this is less of a problem because the source of truth is the same shape as the conceptual structure of the environment.
bbqbbqbbq 4y ago
pasc1878 4y ago
But you gain the ability to use tools that understand the language or the underlying AST, they look at the structure rather than a context free view of text. You add the tools to the IDE. As for database corruption - that is a well known issue databases have good resilience to crashes and power losses
- derekzhouzhen 4y ago

ltbarcly3 4y ago

Looking at this tool, if I had to work in this environment the first thing I would do is figure out how to edit the files in Emacs. This looks extremely frustrating and painful and very much not compatible with how someone would need to use it to be productive. Imagine you have to jump between 3 functions for some reason, you have to go through this 4 level + deep hierarchy? Why? How does this help? There are lots of ways of organizing the world hierarchically, that you CAN do that does not mean it's helpful to do it, more `organized` does not imply better.

0xblood 4y ago

Neat, but not more. I prefer to define my own context (splitting into files as I see fit) and using code folding etc. which can achieve a similar result without fundamentally changing workflows (as others pointed out - editors, git, grep, ..). Each time you want to write a new function ("word" I guess) requires somewhat of a context switch as you have to navigate through a GUI to where it should go, where just swapping files in my editors buffers feel more naturally. But then again I have never tried working like this and maybe I'd have to try

95014_refugee 4y ago

This is another (interesting) spin on the language workbench / program as datastructure concept. Honestly, the problem is that people think they want faster horses. You see the usual banal comments here "what if the database crashes", "I just want to edit with Emacs", but no consideration (usually due to no exposure) of the upside of always having the program in a state that can be comprehended mechanically. It's unfortunate, because it ties us to maintaining and building programs like it's the 70s. For a fresher take on what this could enable if the general programming population were a bit less reactionary, consider the (sadly moribund) http://mbeddr.com http://mbeddr.com