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The Wa Programming Language

52 points by chai2010 4y ago

chai2010 4y ago
Wa is a general-purpose programming language designed for developing robustness and maintainability WebAssembly software. Instead of requiring complex toolchains to set up, you can simply go install it - or run it in a browser. - Home: https://wa-lang.org https://wa-lang.org - Github: https://github.com/wa-lang/wa https://github.com/wa-lang/wa - Playground: https://wa-lang.org/playground/ https://wa-lang.org/playground/
DriftRegion 4y ago
from https://wa-lang.org/ https://wa-lang.org/ > 自主可控、纯中文国内社区 > Independent and controllable, pure Chinese domestic community Doing software projects for domestic and foreign users is extra work, and the community seems to fragment along language lines. For example: https://www.esp32.com/index.php https://www.esp32.com/index.php I guess a 纯中文国内社区 is one way to solve this, but then why post on hacker news? This seems contradictory.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Had to deepl "自主可控、纯中文国内社区" to understand that your comment meant it translated to "pure Chinese domestic community", which implies if we are not part of the gang, we can't enjoy the project. Well, we've been doing this implicitly with English for a long time, so I guess Karma is a bitch. On the other hand, I wrote a French technical blog for years, and it was way harder to reach a lot of people, so if I had to do it again, it would be in English. They don't have this problem, since 1B people are Chinese.
  - anononaut 4y ago
    This doesn't seem like an appropriate conclusion. There's a massive semantic difference between "China #1" and "Sorry, I only know English." Karma doesn't come into play here.
  - tgv 4y ago
    > Well, we've been doing this implicitly with English for a long time, so I guess Karma is a bitch. Or it's their loss. 7B people don't speak a word of Mandarin, and even more can't read and write it.
    - alrlroipsp 4y ago
      ~7B of those would not pick up a new fringe language either way.
      - zen21 4y ago
        Nor will ~1B of the rest.
- asplake 4y ago
  That there’s apparently an unmet need or an unscratched itch might be newsworthy enough. If it’s a strategic move, them more so, surely?
anfelor 4y ago
No matter its technical merits, I would never use a programming language where I don't know the dominant (natural) language of the community. Every project has bugs and discussions how to work around them. This project has 12 Github issues. How severe are they? Will I hit them? I don't know because they are written in Chinese. (But this is not unique to Chinese, I feel the same way about French projects on OCaml and Coq).
- endergen 4y ago
  Most people in the world pretty much have to, due to the prevalence of English in CS based businesses, projects, and academia.
  - lynguist 4y ago
    Seems unlikely. An estimated 2 billion people understand English globally. That number is only growing. While Excel has probably the most programmers in the world, their instructions are localized. And among programmers of other programming languages I bet that way over 50% understand English. So I’d say that most programmers do understand English.
    - RobertoG 4y ago
      >> An estimated 2 billion people understand English globally. That number is only growing. And what's the reason for that? Exactly what the comment you are answering says. >> While Excel has probably the most programmers in the world, their instructions are localized. And what a mess that is. And if you have a problem chances are that the answer will be in English. So, again, you have to know English. >> And among programmers of other programming languages I bet that way over 50% understand English. So I’d say that most programmers do understand English. Again, they don't have an option, have they? Who knows? Maybe, someday in the future we will have to learn Mandarin.
      - Joker_vD 4y ago
        > And what a mess that is Not really; there are no localized function names for languages that use non-Latin based scripts because otherwise one would have to constantly switch keyboard layouts to type any formula. Except for the Russian version of Excel which uses Latin-spelt cell names (D1, F2, etc.) but Cyrillic-spelt function names (ЕСЛИ, СУММ, БЕССЕЛЬ.J, etc.), of course. > Maybe, someday in the future we will have to learn Mandarin. Optimists study English, pessimists study Mandarin, realists study M16.
samatman 4y ago
Apropos of approximately nothing, I had a hunch what this was about and was completely wrong! The Hanzi had me going for about five seconds; they don't mean 和. Anyway, if anyone does write a programming language with keywords and text in Kanji, let us know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(Japanese_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(Japanese_culture)
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  This new information make Wario a completely different character to me
  - liftm 4y ago
    > His name is a portmanteau of Mario's name and the Japanese word warui (悪い), meaning "bad".
- HKH2 4y ago
  > The Hanzi had me going for about five seconds; they don't mean 和. You mean Pinyin (拼音), not Hanzi (漢字).
- h4n1 4y ago
  Since Classical Chinese is ancestral to kanji, you might be interested in https://wy-lang.org/ https://wy-lang.org/
- kagevf 4y ago
  This wikipedia article lists some: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B0%E3%83%A9%E3%83%9F%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0%E8%A8%80%E8%AA%9E https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3...
vanderZwan 4y ago
Wonder if this will pick up after Walt seems to have been abandoned in favor of AssemblyScript. [0] https://github.com/ballercat/walt https://github.com/ballercat/walt [1] https://www.assemblyscript.org/ https://www.assemblyscript.org/
anentropic 4y ago
At first glance it looks a lot like Go, but you can already compile Go to WASM I believe. In which case I'm curious what are the differences or use case vs just using Go?
- alrlroipsp 4y ago
  > At first glance it looks a lot like Go But, this is not at all how go looks: fn add(a: i32, b: i32) => i32 { return a+b } It looks heavily inspired from the syntax used in rust or zig tho. (fn keyword, variable type syntax, return value) > what are the differences or use case vs just using Go? - go has a different syntax, different keywords, different ecosystem and so on. - go is a general purpose programming language, while wa is explicit in targeting wasm. I don't see any special similarities more than they are c-style family languages.
  - bentheklutz 4y ago
    There is a six character difference discounting the fact that one calls the type i32 vs Golang's int32; four are punctuation that may or may not be required for ability to parse correctly and 2 are from "fn" -> "func." Each of the common tokens is arranged in the same order relative to one another. If one affords themselves the use of "type i32 int32" in Golang, then it is fn add(a: i32, b: i32) => i32 { return a + b; } vs func add(a i32, b i32) i32 { return a + b; } Compare with a syntax like C, C#, or Java where you have tokens in the declaration in almost the reverse order i32 add(i32 a, i32 b) { return a + b; } The two (Golang and Wa) are certainly distinct, but I would say they are closer than simply both being C-style for this particular case at least.
    - Joker_vD 4y ago
      The ":" and "=>" are almost definitely superfluous, parsing "a: i32, b: 32" and "a, b: i32, c: i64" is no more difficult as parsing "a i32, b i32" and "a, b i32, c i64". The same is true for colons in Python: they're not really necessary but provide slighlty better readability plus syntax highlighters can get away with using regexes, I guess.
travisgriggs 4y ago
When I saw the headline, I figured this was something out of the University of Washington, and therefore named after my home state of Washington. :) It obviously is not. What does “wa” mean in Chinese? Or is it really just (w)eb (a)ssembly?
- 3dgen 4y ago
  "wa" is the pronunciation of "凹" Chinese is a kind of hieroglyph. The shape of "凹" is very similar to the logo of this project, and it looks like the letter "C" rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. So it maybe means a C/Coder that lies down.
sydbarrett74 4y ago
So if there were a derivative (child) language, would it be called Ben Wa?

52 points by chai2010 4y ago

chai2010 4y ago

Wa is a general-purpose programming language designed for developing robustness and maintainability WebAssembly software. Instead of requiring complex toolchains to set up, you can simply go install it - or run it in a browser. - Home: https://wa-lang.org https://wa-lang.org - Github: https://github.com/wa-lang/wa https://github.com/wa-lang/wa - Playground: https://wa-lang.org/playground/ https://wa-lang.org/playground/

DriftRegion 4y ago

from https://wa-lang.org/ https://wa-lang.org/ > 自主可控、纯中文国内社区 > Independent and controllable, pure Chinese domestic community Doing software projects for domestic and foreign users is extra work, and the community seems to fragment along language lines. For example: https://www.esp32.com/index.php https://www.esp32.com/index.php I guess a 纯中文国内社区 is one way to solve this, but then why post on hacker news? This seems contradictory.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Had to deepl "自主可控、纯中文国内社区" to understand that your comment meant it translated to "pure Chinese domestic community", which implies if we are not part of the gang, we can't enjoy the project. Well, we've been doing this implicitly with English for a long time, so I guess Karma is a bitch. On the other hand, I wrote a French technical blog for years, and it was way harder to reach a lot of people, so if I had to do it again, it would be in English. They don't have this problem, since 1B people are Chinese.
- anononaut 4y ago
  This doesn't seem like an appropriate conclusion. There's a massive semantic difference between "China #1" and "Sorry, I only know English." Karma doesn't come into play here.
- tgv 4y ago
  > Well, we've been doing this implicitly with English for a long time, so I guess Karma is a bitch. Or it's their loss. 7B people don't speak a word of Mandarin, and even more can't read and write it.
  - alrlroipsp 4y ago
    ~7B of those would not pick up a new fringe language either way.
    - zen21 4y ago
      Nor will ~1B of the rest.
asplake 4y ago
That there’s apparently an unmet need or an unscratched itch might be newsworthy enough. If it’s a strategic move, them more so, surely?

anfelor 4y ago

No matter its technical merits, I would never use a programming language where I don't know the dominant (natural) language of the community. Every project has bugs and discussions how to work around them. This project has 12 Github issues. How severe are they? Will I hit them? I don't know because they are written in Chinese. (But this is not unique to Chinese, I feel the same way about French projects on OCaml and Coq).

endergen 4y ago
Most people in the world pretty much have to, due to the prevalence of English in CS based businesses, projects, and academia.
- lynguist 4y ago
  Seems unlikely. An estimated 2 billion people understand English globally. That number is only growing. While Excel has probably the most programmers in the world, their instructions are localized. And among programmers of other programming languages I bet that way over 50% understand English. So I’d say that most programmers do understand English.
  - RobertoG 4y ago
    >> An estimated 2 billion people understand English globally. That number is only growing. And what's the reason for that? Exactly what the comment you are answering says. >> While Excel has probably the most programmers in the world, their instructions are localized. And what a mess that is. And if you have a problem chances are that the answer will be in English. So, again, you have to know English. >> And among programmers of other programming languages I bet that way over 50% understand English. So I’d say that most programmers do understand English. Again, they don't have an option, have they? Who knows? Maybe, someday in the future we will have to learn Mandarin.
    - Joker_vD 4y ago
      > And what a mess that is Not really; there are no localized function names for languages that use non-Latin based scripts because otherwise one would have to constantly switch keyboard layouts to type any formula. Except for the Russian version of Excel which uses Latin-spelt cell names (D1, F2, etc.) but Cyrillic-spelt function names (ЕСЛИ, СУММ, БЕССЕЛЬ.J, etc.), of course. > Maybe, someday in the future we will have to learn Mandarin. Optimists study English, pessimists study Mandarin, realists study M16.

samatman 4y ago

Apropos of approximately nothing, I had a hunch what this was about and was completely wrong! The Hanzi had me going for about five seconds; they don't mean 和. Anyway, if anyone does write a programming language with keywords and text in Kanji, let us know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(Japanese_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(Japanese_culture)

vanderZwan 4y ago
This new information make Wario a completely different character to me
- liftm 4y ago
  > His name is a portmanteau of Mario's name and the Japanese word warui (悪い), meaning "bad".
HKH2 4y ago
> The Hanzi had me going for about five seconds; they don't mean 和. You mean Pinyin (拼音), not Hanzi (漢字).
h4n1 4y ago
Since Classical Chinese is ancestral to kanji, you might be interested in https://wy-lang.org/ https://wy-lang.org/
kagevf 4y ago
This wikipedia article lists some: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%83%97%E3%83%AD%E3%82%B0%E3%83%A9%E3%83%9F%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0%E8%A8%80%E8%AA%9E https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3...

vanderZwan 4y ago

Wonder if this will pick up after Walt seems to have been abandoned in favor of AssemblyScript. [0] https://github.com/ballercat/walt https://github.com/ballercat/walt [1] https://www.assemblyscript.org/ https://www.assemblyscript.org/

anentropic 4y ago

At first glance it looks a lot like Go, but you can already compile Go to WASM I believe. In which case I'm curious what are the differences or use case vs just using Go?

alrlroipsp 4y ago
> At first glance it looks a lot like Go But, this is not at all how go looks: fn add(a: i32, b: i32) => i32 { return a+b } It looks heavily inspired from the syntax used in rust or zig tho. (fn keyword, variable type syntax, return value) > what are the differences or use case vs just using Go? - go has a different syntax, different keywords, different ecosystem and so on. - go is a general purpose programming language, while wa is explicit in targeting wasm. I don't see any special similarities more than they are c-style family languages.
- bentheklutz 4y ago
  There is a six character difference discounting the fact that one calls the type i32 vs Golang's int32; four are punctuation that may or may not be required for ability to parse correctly and 2 are from "fn" -> "func." Each of the common tokens is arranged in the same order relative to one another. If one affords themselves the use of "type i32 int32" in Golang, then it is fn add(a: i32, b: i32) => i32 { return a + b; } vs func add(a i32, b i32) i32 { return a + b; } Compare with a syntax like C, C#, or Java where you have tokens in the declaration in almost the reverse order i32 add(i32 a, i32 b) { return a + b; } The two (Golang and Wa) are certainly distinct, but I would say they are closer than simply both being C-style for this particular case at least.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    The ":" and "=>" are almost definitely superfluous, parsing "a: i32, b: 32" and "a, b: i32, c: i64" is no more difficult as parsing "a i32, b i32" and "a, b i32, c i64". The same is true for colons in Python: they're not really necessary but provide slighlty better readability plus syntax highlighters can get away with using regexes, I guess.

travisgriggs 4y ago

When I saw the headline, I figured this was something out of the University of Washington, and therefore named after my home state of Washington. :) It obviously is not. What does “wa” mean in Chinese? Or is it really just (w)eb (a)ssembly?

3dgen 4y ago
"wa" is the pronunciation of "凹" Chinese is a kind of hieroglyph. The shape of "凹" is very similar to the logo of this project, and it looks like the letter "C" rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. So it maybe means a C/Coder that lies down.

sydbarrett74 4y ago

So if there were a derivative (child) language, would it be called Ben Wa?