4 ms·

Unfortunately, this graph is at least misleading, if not wrong. The middle path is overly prominent; the detour to Object Oberon (probably so that Griesemer's n

by Rochus 3y ago

Unfortunately, this graph is at least misleading, if not wrong. The middle path is overly prominent; the detour to Object Oberon (probably so that Griesemer's name is represented) is amusing. Actually there should be a direct line from Newsqueak to Go. Aleph's brief intermezzo is mostly historically relevant for Go, not technically. The path from C should actually point primarily to Newsqueak (in addition to Pascal). Technically, there would be a very thick arrow from Newsqueak to Go, a slightly less thick from C to Go, and a very thin one from Oberon-2 and a few other languages. But as a highly simplified representation of the languages and people directly and indirectly involved and the chronological sequence, the graph is ok.

kragen 3y ago
it's true that golang is basically newsqueak with structural interface types, but newsqueak is pretty obviously strongly pascal-influenced. i agree that newsqueak shows significant c influence, but in most of the ways that c and pascal differ, it follows pascal. and it seems unavoidable that griesemer spending his grad school at wirth's school hacking on wirth's language oberon would have influenced the taste he applied to golang
- Rochus 3y ago
  In case you're interested I'm looking for feedback for my Oberon concurrency proposal: https://github.com/oberon-lang/oberon-lang.github.io/blob/main/_posts/2023-12-25-towards-concurrency.md https://github.com/oberon-lang/oberon-lang.github.io/blob/ma...
  - kragen 3y ago
    i'll take a look! but i don't know much about oberon, though i have the book
    - Rochus 3y ago
      Great, thanks! There are books online for free, e.g. https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProgInOberonWR.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProgInOberonWR.pdf and https://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/Oberon2.pdf https://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/Oberon2.pdf Oberon+ is a superset of Oberon 90 and Oberon-2. Here is more information: https://oberon-lang.github.io/ https://oberon-lang.github.io/, and here is the current language specification: https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The_Programming_Language_Oberon%2B.adoc https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The.... I already had valuable feedback here on HN concerning the channel extensions. Further research brought me to the conclusion, that Oberon+ should support both, channels and also monitors, because even in Go, the sync package primitives are used twice as much as channels. Mutexes and condition variables can be emulated with channels (I tried my luck here: https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-emulate-mutexes-and-condition-variables-using-Go-channels-only/answer/Rochus-Keller https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-emulate-mutexes-and-conditi...), but for efficiency reasons I think monitors should be directly supported in the language as well, even if it might collide with the goal of simplicity. Feel free to comment here or e.g. in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903351 or in https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/discussions/45 https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/discussions/45.
      - kragen 3y ago
        sorry for the delay i don't know that much about concurrency in general, so take this with a grain of salt i feel like monitors are potentially an improvement over bare locks, but they tend to perform poorly in manycore settings and are still vulnerable to deadlock, perhaps more so due to their implicit nature. (i see that you point this out with respect to java, and also that it doesn't really have monitors.) fundamentally, blocking synchronization of any kind is incompatible with modularity you misspelled brinch (rip) there are lots of versions of actors, and the most influential one effectively didn't have any concurrency at all, so it's important to disambiguate in the text that you're talking about the one in agha's 01985 dissertation, which is also very influential. also your footnote says it's from "1986"; is that a different document by agha with the same title? objects with their own threads (like concurrent actors or like processes in csp or erlang) are not the same thing as monitors, contrary to your assertion in the 'concurrency in oberon' section. there is a well-known duality between message passing between threads and control passing between monitors, but the mechanisms have quite different ergonomics and common failure modes it's surprising that in a discussion that surveys original-modula, modula-2, csp, erlang, active oberon, c, c++, concurrent pascal, object pascal, superpascal, joyce, newsqueak, old squeak, alef, limbo, golang, java, and ada, you didn't mention javascript at all. in browsers and node, javascript's concurrency model was originally that of original oberon — each event handler runs to completion in succession — which strongly suggests that the concurrency facilities it has added more recently might be worth a look. those are python-like async/await, sometimes caricatured as 'colored functions', and web workers. also it might be worthwhile to at least mention the π-calculus my uninformed viewpoint is that js, erlang, haskell with its stm, and (non-async!) rust are the languages with the most promising approaches to the concurrency problem. all four of them work hard to be safe (unlike the entire rest of the js language), though i think their concurrency safety guarantees are all to some degree fragile. except maybe haskell, which i haven't tried your reference [31] https://www.jtolio.com/2016/03/go-channels-are-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad/ https://www.jtolio.com/2016/03/go-channels-are-bad-and-you-s... doesn't purport to show that no single concurrency construct is adequate, as you claim, or even that communication channels are inadequate; rather, it argues that the implementation in golang of that concept is inadequate, because golang implements them inefficiently, because it can't garbage-collect processes, because there are some design errors, and that because golang also offers other concurrency constructs (as you propose for oberon+), it's hard to avoid concurrency bugs. though certainly not conclusive evidence, this runs strongly against the conclusion you are using it to argue for also your bibliography incorrectly abbreviates 'per brinch hansen' as 'hansen, p. b.' rather than 'brinch hansen, p.' a few times i hope this is helpful, and i'm glad to see you're exploring how to solve this problem! feel free to copy or excerpt my comments elsewhere if you think it would be useful
rob74 3y ago
Here's the accompanying text from The Go Programming Language for that line in the graph: > One major stream of influence comes from languages by Niklaus Wirth, beginning with Pascal. Modula-2 inspired the package concept, Oberon eliminated the distinction between module interface files and module implementation files. Oberon-2 influenced the syntax for packages, imports, and declarations, and Object Oberon provided the syntax for method declarations. So mostly packages and syntax - not the most exciting stuff, but the package concept contributes to enabling Go's compilation speed, so it shouldn't be disregarded. Ok, you can still argue that many or most of the C/Pascal-family influences were already present in Newsqueak (I'm only familiar with Pascal, C and Go, so I can't judge that), but I think it's understandable that they wanted to have the language the book is about at the focal point of the graph, and not one of its less successful and more obscure ancestors.
- Rochus 3y ago
  Thanks, I have the book. The major influence had Pascal on Newsqueak. I don't see any specific similarity between Modula-2 and Go. There are other languages which are at least as close or even closer. The last sentence is even wrong. Object Oberon is a completely different language in terms of OO. Go uses the receiver syntax of Oberon-2, which is a completely different concept than in Object Oberon.

by Rochus 3y ago

kragen 3y ago

it's true that golang is basically newsqueak with structural interface types, but newsqueak is pretty obviously strongly pascal-influenced. i agree that newsqueak shows significant c influence, but in most of the ways that c and pascal differ, it follows pascal. and it seems unavoidable that griesemer spending his grad school at wirth's school hacking on wirth's language oberon would have influenced the taste he applied to golang

Rochus 3y ago
In case you're interested I'm looking for feedback for my Oberon concurrency proposal: https://github.com/oberon-lang/oberon-lang.github.io/blob/main/_posts/2023-12-25-towards-concurrency.md https://github.com/oberon-lang/oberon-lang.github.io/blob/ma...
- kragen 3y ago
  i'll take a look! but i don't know much about oberon, though i have the book
  - Rochus 3y ago
    Great, thanks! There are books online for free, e.g. https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProgInOberonWR.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProgInOberonWR.pdf and https://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/Oberon2.pdf https://ssw.jku.at/Research/Books/Oberon2.pdf Oberon+ is a superset of Oberon 90 and Oberon-2. Here is more information: https://oberon-lang.github.io/ https://oberon-lang.github.io/, and here is the current language specification: https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The_Programming_Language_Oberon%2B.adoc https://github.com/oberon-lang/specification/blob/master/The.... I already had valuable feedback here on HN concerning the channel extensions. Further research brought me to the conclusion, that Oberon+ should support both, channels and also monitors, because even in Go, the sync package primitives are used twice as much as channels. Mutexes and condition variables can be emulated with channels (I tried my luck here: https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-emulate-mutexes-and-condition-variables-using-Go-channels-only/answer/Rochus-Keller https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-emulate-mutexes-and-conditi...), but for efficiency reasons I think monitors should be directly supported in the language as well, even if it might collide with the goal of simplicity. Feel free to comment here or e.g. in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38903351 or in https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/discussions/45 https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/discussions/45.
    - kragen 3y ago
      sorry for the delay i don't know that much about concurrency in general, so take this with a grain of salt i feel like monitors are potentially an improvement over bare locks, but they tend to perform poorly in manycore settings and are still vulnerable to deadlock, perhaps more so due to their implicit nature. (i see that you point this out with respect to java, and also that it doesn't really have monitors.) fundamentally, blocking synchronization of any kind is incompatible with modularity you misspelled brinch (rip) there are lots of versions of actors, and the most influential one effectively didn't have any concurrency at all, so it's important to disambiguate in the text that you're talking about the one in agha's 01985 dissertation, which is also very influential. also your footnote says it's from "1986"; is that a different document by agha with the same title? objects with their own threads (like concurrent actors or like processes in csp or erlang) are not the same thing as monitors, contrary to your assertion in the 'concurrency in oberon' section. there is a well-known duality between message passing between threads and control passing between monitors, but the mechanisms have quite different ergonomics and common failure modes it's surprising that in a discussion that surveys original-modula, modula-2, csp, erlang, active oberon, c, c++, concurrent pascal, object pascal, superpascal, joyce, newsqueak, old squeak, alef, limbo, golang, java, and ada, you didn't mention javascript at all. in browsers and node, javascript's concurrency model was originally that of original oberon — each event handler runs to completion in succession — which strongly suggests that the concurrency facilities it has added more recently might be worth a look. those are python-like async/await, sometimes caricatured as 'colored functions', and web workers. also it might be worthwhile to at least mention the π-calculus my uninformed viewpoint is that js, erlang, haskell with its stm, and (non-async!) rust are the languages with the most promising approaches to the concurrency problem. all four of them work hard to be safe (unlike the entire rest of the js language), though i think their concurrency safety guarantees are all to some degree fragile. except maybe haskell, which i haven't tried your reference [31] https://www.jtolio.com/2016/03/go-channels-are-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad/ https://www.jtolio.com/2016/03/go-channels-are-bad-and-you-s... doesn't purport to show that no single concurrency construct is adequate, as you claim, or even that communication channels are inadequate; rather, it argues that the implementation in golang of that concept is inadequate, because golang implements them inefficiently, because it can't garbage-collect processes, because there are some design errors, and that because golang also offers other concurrency constructs (as you propose for oberon+), it's hard to avoid concurrency bugs. though certainly not conclusive evidence, this runs strongly against the conclusion you are using it to argue for also your bibliography incorrectly abbreviates 'per brinch hansen' as 'hansen, p. b.' rather than 'brinch hansen, p.' a few times i hope this is helpful, and i'm glad to see you're exploring how to solve this problem! feel free to copy or excerpt my comments elsewhere if you think it would be useful

rob74 3y ago

Here's the accompanying text from The Go Programming Language for that line in the graph: > One major stream of influence comes from languages by Niklaus Wirth, beginning with Pascal. Modula-2 inspired the package concept, Oberon eliminated the distinction between module interface files and module implementation files. Oberon-2 influenced the syntax for packages, imports, and declarations, and Object Oberon provided the syntax for method declarations. So mostly packages and syntax - not the most exciting stuff, but the package concept contributes to enabling Go's compilation speed, so it shouldn't be disregarded. Ok, you can still argue that many or most of the C/Pascal-family influences were already present in Newsqueak (I'm only familiar with Pascal, C and Go, so I can't judge that), but I think it's understandable that they wanted to have the language the book is about at the focal point of the graph, and not one of its less successful and more obscure ancestors.

Rochus 3y ago
Thanks, I have the book. The major influence had Pascal on Newsqueak. I don't see any specific similarity between Modula-2 and Go. There are other languages which are at least as close or even closer. The last sentence is even wrong. Object Oberon is a completely different language in terms of OO. Go uses the receiver syntax of Oberon-2, which is a completely different concept than in Object Oberon.