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Hi, this is Mark, the lead researcher and developer on the project. Cool to see it on HN today. Happy to answer any questions! As a bit of an update, this proj

Hi, this is Mark, the lead researcher and developer on the project. Cool to see it on HN today. Happy to answer any questions! As a bit of an update, this project is not at Microsoft Research anymore. The new (main) repository is at https://github.com/BosqueLanguage/BosqueCore https://github.com/BosqueLanguage/BosqueCore. MSR was a great place to work and do the initial work on this project, but was not the right place to make this a fully free and open language for real users. Progress was a but slow in the last year while I found a new home but I am very excited to be starting as a professor at the University of Kentucy in January where Bosque will be the main project for my group! There is a paper from earlier this year that describes the language design, based on our experiments over the last few years, and shows some results from prototype tools built on the language. The Intro and Section 7 are pretty good for a quick overview of things: https://github.com/BosqueLanguage/BosqueCore/blob/main/docs/research/papers/bosque.pdf https://github.com/BosqueLanguage/BosqueCore/blob/main/docs/...

mb7733 3y ago
Very interesting ideas -- all the way the small practical stuff like being able to expose symbols only for testing without making them public, up to the more ambitious stuff about validation and constraint checking. As a broad research language the pitch is probably not focused enough to draw in users that happen across the docs, but I doubt mass adoption is the goal at this point! I would love to use a language that implemented even just the "simple" parts, and I doubt I would be the only one. One specific suggestion I have about the overview and docs is that I think the language around "Cloud" and "Restful/API computing" is more specific than it needs to be. While features like the APITypes would definitely be most useful for cloud/web software, I think the same ideas could be very useful for any kind of software. Anything that even writes a JSON config file could benefit from that concept if I understand it correctly.

mb7733 3y ago

Very interesting ideas -- all the way the small practical stuff like being able to expose symbols only for testing without making them public, up to the more ambitious stuff about validation and constraint checking. As a broad research language the pitch is probably not focused enough to draw in users that happen across the docs, but I doubt mass adoption is the goal at this point! I would love to use a language that implemented even just the "simple" parts, and I doubt I would be the only one. One specific suggestion I have about the overview and docs is that I think the language around "Cloud" and "Restful/API computing" is more specific than it needs to be. While features like the APITypes would definitely be most useful for cloud/web software, I think the same ideas could be very useful for any kind of software. Anything that even writes a JSON config file could benefit from that concept if I understand it correctly.