5 ms·

Mythryl Programming Language

44 points by lg 17y ago

MoeDrippins 17y ago
Not sure if this is the reddit (et. al.) effect, but man that site is sllllloooowwwww for me.
- chancho 17y ago
  When complaining about "the effect" on a news aggregation site it's customary to refer to it by the name of said site. So here it is called "The HN effect." Nevermind the absurdity of this name, on account of HN's (thankfully) small community size. It's just polite. If you MUST refer to "the effect" by any other name, give credit to the historical originator: It's called "The Slashdot Effect." Not Digg, and certainly not reddit. (Actually I'm not sure Slashdot was the first, though I was aware of "slashdotting" as a verb more than 10 years ago. Anyone know of predating claim to "the effect" by another site?")
  - whughes 17y ago
    Before being condescending, you should check to see if there is a valid claim to the reddit effect: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/906yc/mythryl_programming_languge/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/906yc/mythryl_p... I'm not sure what your post added to the discussion, but his alerted other people that the problem wasn't on their side, and it also stated that there was a discussion on reddit.
  - MoeDrippins 17y ago
    My apologies; I figured the "et. al." would have covered that.
mahmud 17y ago
Mythryl is a rewrite of the SML/NJ compiler http://mythryl.org/book153.html http://mythryl.org/book153.html And for the code examples: http://mythryl.org/book117.html http://mythryl.org/book117.html It looks like they've put a familiar, scriptish, face on an old gladiator. SML/NJ has more academic street cred than any other compiler that I know of. It did for the compiler research of FPLs what the Fortran H compiler did for procedural languages on pipelined architectures. It has been hacked on by the who's who of compiler research groups; Princeton, Stanford, UT Austin, etc. (thank god CMU had better things to do, staying a Lisp shop ;-) P.S. Dr. Norman Ramsey, I know you read Reddit but I am not sure if you come here; old man, you turned me to FPLs in 1998 with your original "hacker challenge" :-) I stumbled upon your site looking for blackhat "hacking" materials and ended up writing a linker a month later because I stayed and read your papers.
- jongraehl 17y ago
  http://mythryl.org/book130.html http://mythryl.org/book130.html gives some differences from SML/NJ. It looks like it's slightly more than a new syntax skin (which is good, because otherwise the decision to fork was horrible; SML/NJ now has 64bit and the fork doesn't). Mythryl handles (as part of language defn) printf format strings => type safe library call (I think Ocaml did this too). The only thing I found that seemed substantial (more than syntax) was explicit support for an eval facility (also in SML/NJ, but not officially) - eval: String -> Void; evali: String -> Int; evalf: String -> Float; evals: String -> String; evalli: String -> List( Int ); evallf: String -> List( Float ); evalls: String -> List( String ); But only for those result types (!) Syntax difference table: http://mythryl.org/book135.html http://mythryl.org/book135.html I definitely prefer mythryl's syntax on the whole, to SML's.
tedunangst 17y ago
Site is running really slow now, but the wikipedia article provides a quick taste. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythryl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythryl
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
silentbicycle 17y ago
"Mythryl is currently supported only on 32-bit x86 Linux." It sounds cool, but bootstrapping elsewhere would probably be a huge pain. (I port stuff, and generally work on 64-bit AMD OpenBSD.) Too bad, really - I would love to see a more "mainstream" dialect of ML than OCaml.
- gaius 17y ago
  What would you say prevents OCaml becoming more mainstream? F# gets the full backing of the world's biggest software vendor in VS 2010...
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    1. Lack of documentation. While there is some documentation on the web (and the free translation of the O'Reilly book is quite good), it's probably too little, too late. There are very few books published in English, and one of the most accessible of them (Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith) is IMHO one of the most poorly-written programming books I have ever seen. 2. Haskell seems to be getting most of the attention in that niche. (This is arguably the biggest factor.) Its community is somewhat small, and it doesn't have the general presence, marketing, word-of-mouth, etc. that Haskell does, and it had years and years to do so. 3. There are lots of cases in the OCaml implementation where they could have made it much, much more friendly to people trying to learn its typing, but didn't. ("Error: This expression has type t but is here used with type t" is baffling.) The exception system has a lot of rough edges, too - Debugging a program throwing the exception of "Not_found" without any context provided is rather irritating. 4. It cuts more than a few usability corners for sake of pure speed. Some people consider this a feature, but I don't like it as a default. 5. Its support for concurrency is not great (though this may have gotten better lately). OCaml is one of my favorite languages, but there are a lot of ways it could be made nicer. While I don't use the .NET languages, it's at least reassuring to see that other languages are using the good ideas from the ML family.
    - jongraehl 17y ago
      Ocaml is still making you fork to multiprocess. I agree that the docs + stdlib aren't great. But the performance is very good, and the type checker is awesome. I like it (in my experience on toy problems). You mentioned performance vs. usability - Not_found is vague for a reason; it's the way you find out if a key is in a hashtable (no null or Maybe return). Exceptions without payload are apparently very efficient in Ocaml; they're used often in "non-exceptional" cases in the library.
huhtenberg 17y ago
Mythryl is not just a bag of features like C++ or Python This reads like programmers' dialect of a marketing speak. It's bold, flashy, presumably based on some facts that are not immediately obvious and it also trashes competitors along the way :)
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Python is a really clever small(ish) language and VM that can be embedded in C other programs and serve as glue code for modules in C. It's also grown to be a good scripting language for the technical crowd. C++ started out as a way to have decent OO on top of C as a preprocessor. There are far too many features in it for my taste. Ruby: lots of nice things, but err on the "bag of features" side. Lisp: syntax stripped of almost all sugar. Stripped down to the basics. Scheme is the Ariel Atom of programming languages. Smalltalk: add just enough syntax sugar to lose some power of Lisp, but retain enough to be a complete meta-language. (Not enough syntax to please most of the non CS crowd.) I interpret "not just a bag of features" as another way to say that there are unifying design concepts, as there are in Smalltalk and Lisp.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    You might want to look at Lua, FWIW. It focuses more on being a "really clever small language for embedding in C". (It also actually has tail call optimization, non-broken lambdas, no need for a GIL, etc.)
    - swolchok 17y ago
      Worse is Better -- being a better product can't make up for a lack of momentum.
      - joeyo 17y ago
        Is it your assertion that Lua does not have momentum?
Goladus 17y ago
The ocaml manual has me writing a basic lexer and parser by the end of chapter 1, with minimal cheerleading and condescension. http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual003.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual003.html. The mythryl docs had me annoyed after about 10 minutes of clicking around the various different areas trying to figure out the point of the language.
IsaacSchlueter 17y ago
I kind of dig this language. It's enough like C and sh to be easy for just about anyone to pick up, but has some very nice features and a more elegant consistency than most of its cousins. It's a shame that it's only available on Linux. Anyone tried to get it running on OS X?
caffeine 17y ago
I spent the first four years of this millennium doing eighty-hour weeks at a [...] division internally famous for producing more revenue per employee than the IRS. Man ... how do I get a job like that?! I really want that job!
davidmathers 17y ago
C++, Java, Python, Perl, Php and Ruby are all based on software technology dating back to 1972. Switching from one of them to Mythryl means leaping forward thirty years to thoroughly modern technology, yielding a quantum jump in expressiveness and flexibility. Robin Milner started working on ML around 1973-1974. Finished by 1978. So it's a 6 year leap at best.
DanielStraight 17y ago
I'm sorry, but their code formatting (an equals sign and a brace each on their own line to start a function???) and choice of syntax is just atrocious. "Fi" and "esac"... are you serious? At least we don't have to type nuf to end functions and ipa to end api definitions. In VB, you type End and then what you are ending. In Ruby, you just type end. In Mythryl, who knows? Sometimes it's a backwards word, sometimes it's end, sometimes it's a brace. This is what a well-designed language looks like to them? Furthermore, they talk about things being built in from the start, but the site says that one of the current projects is implementing object oriented programming. How in the world is that not going to be bolted on? If there's anything that you need to bake into a language (if it's going to have them) it's objects. Finally, there is a lot of talk on that page to not have any sense of organization or "here is some cool stuff you can do now that you couldn't before." Usually I'm excited to read about new languages. (Potion looks AWESOME.) This... was disappointing. Sure, it may perform well, but I really don't care. I'd rather ease of programming and maintenance any day. Python and Ruby for the win (at least until Potion is done). Also, they say they're putting the "fun" in "hacking", but as mentioned before, the page looks like it was written for managers and certainly not for hackers.
- jongraehl 17y ago
  I agree that the consistency of esac isn't very nice. I prefer } to esac/fi to end, actually. "end" is horrible. You can consecutively }}}} or )))) in a way that reduces some of the whitespace-significance jealousy end end end end But I don't think the syntax is bad. In fact, "fi" and "esac" give some hints to the reader in deeply nested structures (I can hear it already: then don't deeply nest) The two line = { is only for compound functions; a single expression with a "where" seems fine. I do agree that code layout conventions that reduce the usable vertical space are questionable; scrolling sucks. I didn't especially like SML (or Ocaml) syntax, but they're both solid languages. http://www.smlnj.org/dist/working/index.html http://www.smlnj.org/dist/working/index.html seems to contradict the story by Mythryl's author that SML/NJ isn't maintained. His fork doesn't seem to do 64-bit, while SML/NJ does. I'd be interested in hearing more about the reason this project is not just a set of libraries for SML/NJ. I guess the author has strong opinions about syntax and didn't like ML's.
jongraehl 17y ago
I like the (description of) the language. I love statically typed functional languages with type inferencing. But look forward a few years. Hasn't F# definitively won, except for people who prefer Java libraries (Scala), and people who like lazy computation and/or extreme purity (Haskell)? Yes, F# performance in Mono is bad right now. But there's no reason the language itself can't be implemented (perhaps as a skin on top of the Ocaml code base - or does the license not permit it?) The size of a language community does matter. It's not "most popular 1-3 in each niche live, others die" but "15 years from now, will it still exist, or will the 1-3 hardcore hackers have moved on?"
gjm11 17y ago
Seems like a pretty nice language, though it's basically just syntactic sugar for ML. (Not such a bad thing; syntactic sugar is tasty, and I can understand not liking ML syntax much.) I'm a bit put off by the way the documentation repeatedly says "continuation" where it means "closure".
jganetsk 17y ago
In Mythryl unit becomes Void. The value syntax is unchanged: () No! This is a regression into darkness! Unit should stay unit! According to type theorists: Unit is the data type inhabited with exactly one value (the zero-tuple). That's why it's called "unit". Void is the data type not inhabited with any values. Therefore, a function that typechecks to return type Void never terminates, because there is no value it could return. (The use of "void" in mainstream programming languages corresponds to "unit" in academic settings). Also, if our notion of "function" is an expression with exactly one argument and one return value (like in lambda calculus), then tuples come in handy as function arguments. Especially the zero-tuple, for functions with side effects that need no input data. Like... exit () And that syntax is quite familiar. I understand Mythryl still uses this syntax... but don't conflate void and unit.

44 points by lg 17y ago

MoeDrippins 17y ago

Not sure if this is the reddit (et. al.) effect, but man that site is sllllloooowwwww for me.

chancho 17y ago
When complaining about "the effect" on a news aggregation site it's customary to refer to it by the name of said site. So here it is called "The HN effect." Nevermind the absurdity of this name, on account of HN's (thankfully) small community size. It's just polite. If you MUST refer to "the effect" by any other name, give credit to the historical originator: It's called "The Slashdot Effect." Not Digg, and certainly not reddit. (Actually I'm not sure Slashdot was the first, though I was aware of "slashdotting" as a verb more than 10 years ago. Anyone know of predating claim to "the effect" by another site?")
- whughes 17y ago
  Before being condescending, you should check to see if there is a valid claim to the reddit effect: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/906yc/mythryl_programming_languge/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/906yc/mythryl_p... I'm not sure what your post added to the discussion, but his alerted other people that the problem wasn't on their side, and it also stated that there was a discussion on reddit.
- MoeDrippins 17y ago
  My apologies; I figured the "et. al." would have covered that.

mahmud 17y ago

Mythryl is a rewrite of the SML/NJ compiler http://mythryl.org/book153.html http://mythryl.org/book153.html And for the code examples: http://mythryl.org/book117.html http://mythryl.org/book117.html It looks like they've put a familiar, scriptish, face on an old gladiator. SML/NJ has more academic street cred than any other compiler that I know of. It did for the compiler research of FPLs what the Fortran H compiler did for procedural languages on pipelined architectures. It has been hacked on by the who's who of compiler research groups; Princeton, Stanford, UT Austin, etc. (thank god CMU had better things to do, staying a Lisp shop ;-) P.S. Dr. Norman Ramsey, I know you read Reddit but I am not sure if you come here; old man, you turned me to FPLs in 1998 with your original "hacker challenge" :-) I stumbled upon your site looking for blackhat "hacking" materials and ended up writing a linker a month later because I stayed and read your papers.

jongraehl 17y ago
http://mythryl.org/book130.html http://mythryl.org/book130.html gives some differences from SML/NJ. It looks like it's slightly more than a new syntax skin (which is good, because otherwise the decision to fork was horrible; SML/NJ now has 64bit and the fork doesn't). Mythryl handles (as part of language defn) printf format strings => type safe library call (I think Ocaml did this too). The only thing I found that seemed substantial (more than syntax) was explicit support for an eval facility (also in SML/NJ, but not officially) - eval: String -> Void; evali: String -> Int; evalf: String -> Float; evals: String -> String; evalli: String -> List( Int ); evallf: String -> List( Float ); evalls: String -> List( String ); But only for those result types (!) Syntax difference table: http://mythryl.org/book135.html http://mythryl.org/book135.html I definitely prefer mythryl's syntax on the whole, to SML's.

tedunangst 17y ago

Site is running really slow now, but the wikipedia article provides a quick taste. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythryl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythryl

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

silentbicycle 17y ago

"Mythryl is currently supported only on 32-bit x86 Linux." It sounds cool, but bootstrapping elsewhere would probably be a huge pain. (I port stuff, and generally work on 64-bit AMD OpenBSD.) Too bad, really - I would love to see a more "mainstream" dialect of ML than OCaml.

gaius 17y ago
What would you say prevents OCaml becoming more mainstream? F# gets the full backing of the world's biggest software vendor in VS 2010...
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  1. Lack of documentation. While there is some documentation on the web (and the free translation of the O'Reilly book is quite good), it's probably too little, too late. There are very few books published in English, and one of the most accessible of them (Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith) is IMHO one of the most poorly-written programming books I have ever seen. 2. Haskell seems to be getting most of the attention in that niche. (This is arguably the biggest factor.) Its community is somewhat small, and it doesn't have the general presence, marketing, word-of-mouth, etc. that Haskell does, and it had years and years to do so. 3. There are lots of cases in the OCaml implementation where they could have made it much, much more friendly to people trying to learn its typing, but didn't. ("Error: This expression has type t but is here used with type t" is baffling.) The exception system has a lot of rough edges, too - Debugging a program throwing the exception of "Not_found" without any context provided is rather irritating. 4. It cuts more than a few usability corners for sake of pure speed. Some people consider this a feature, but I don't like it as a default. 5. Its support for concurrency is not great (though this may have gotten better lately). OCaml is one of my favorite languages, but there are a lot of ways it could be made nicer. While I don't use the .NET languages, it's at least reassuring to see that other languages are using the good ideas from the ML family.
  - jongraehl 17y ago
    Ocaml is still making you fork to multiprocess. I agree that the docs + stdlib aren't great. But the performance is very good, and the type checker is awesome. I like it (in my experience on toy problems). You mentioned performance vs. usability - Not_found is vague for a reason; it's the way you find out if a key is in a hashtable (no null or Maybe return). Exceptions without payload are apparently very efficient in Ocaml; they're used often in "non-exceptional" cases in the library.

huhtenberg 17y ago

Mythryl is not just a bag of features like C++ or Python This reads like programmers' dialect of a marketing speak. It's bold, flashy, presumably based on some facts that are not immediately obvious and it also trashes competitors along the way :)

stcredzero 17y ago
Python is a really clever small(ish) language and VM that can be embedded in C other programs and serve as glue code for modules in C. It's also grown to be a good scripting language for the technical crowd. C++ started out as a way to have decent OO on top of C as a preprocessor. There are far too many features in it for my taste. Ruby: lots of nice things, but err on the "bag of features" side. Lisp: syntax stripped of almost all sugar. Stripped down to the basics. Scheme is the Ariel Atom of programming languages. Smalltalk: add just enough syntax sugar to lose some power of Lisp, but retain enough to be a complete meta-language. (Not enough syntax to please most of the non CS crowd.) I interpret "not just a bag of features" as another way to say that there are unifying design concepts, as there are in Smalltalk and Lisp.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  You might want to look at Lua, FWIW. It focuses more on being a "really clever small language for embedding in C". (It also actually has tail call optimization, non-broken lambdas, no need for a GIL, etc.)
  - swolchok 17y ago
    Worse is Better -- being a better product can't make up for a lack of momentum.
    - joeyo 17y ago
      Is it your assertion that Lua does not have momentum?

Goladus 17y ago

The ocaml manual has me writing a basic lexer and parser by the end of chapter 1, with minimal cheerleading and condescension. http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual003.html http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual003.html. The mythryl docs had me annoyed after about 10 minutes of clicking around the various different areas trying to figure out the point of the language.

IsaacSchlueter 17y ago

I kind of dig this language. It's enough like C and sh to be easy for just about anyone to pick up, but has some very nice features and a more elegant consistency than most of its cousins. It's a shame that it's only available on Linux. Anyone tried to get it running on OS X?

caffeine 17y ago

I spent the first four years of this millennium doing eighty-hour weeks at a [...] division internally famous for producing more revenue per employee than the IRS. Man ... how do I get a job like that?! I really want that job!

davidmathers 17y ago

C++, Java, Python, Perl, Php and Ruby are all based on software technology dating back to 1972. Switching from one of them to Mythryl means leaping forward thirty years to thoroughly modern technology, yielding a quantum jump in expressiveness and flexibility. Robin Milner started working on ML around 1973-1974. Finished by 1978. So it's a 6 year leap at best.

DanielStraight 17y ago

I'm sorry, but their code formatting (an equals sign and a brace each on their own line to start a function???) and choice of syntax is just atrocious. "Fi" and "esac"... are you serious? At least we don't have to type nuf to end functions and ipa to end api definitions. In VB, you type End and then what you are ending. In Ruby, you just type end. In Mythryl, who knows? Sometimes it's a backwards word, sometimes it's end, sometimes it's a brace. This is what a well-designed language looks like to them? Furthermore, they talk about things being built in from the start, but the site says that one of the current projects is implementing object oriented programming. How in the world is that not going to be bolted on? If there's anything that you need to bake into a language (if it's going to have them) it's objects. Finally, there is a lot of talk on that page to not have any sense of organization or "here is some cool stuff you can do now that you couldn't before." Usually I'm excited to read about new languages. (Potion looks AWESOME.) This... was disappointing. Sure, it may perform well, but I really don't care. I'd rather ease of programming and maintenance any day. Python and Ruby for the win (at least until Potion is done). Also, they say they're putting the "fun" in "hacking", but as mentioned before, the page looks like it was written for managers and certainly not for hackers.

jongraehl 17y ago
I agree that the consistency of esac isn't very nice. I prefer } to esac/fi to end, actually. "end" is horrible. You can consecutively }}}} or )))) in a way that reduces some of the whitespace-significance jealousy end end end end But I don't think the syntax is bad. In fact, "fi" and "esac" give some hints to the reader in deeply nested structures (I can hear it already: then don't deeply nest) The two line = { is only for compound functions; a single expression with a "where" seems fine. I do agree that code layout conventions that reduce the usable vertical space are questionable; scrolling sucks. I didn't especially like SML (or Ocaml) syntax, but they're both solid languages. http://www.smlnj.org/dist/working/index.html http://www.smlnj.org/dist/working/index.html seems to contradict the story by Mythryl's author that SML/NJ isn't maintained. His fork doesn't seem to do 64-bit, while SML/NJ does. I'd be interested in hearing more about the reason this project is not just a set of libraries for SML/NJ. I guess the author has strong opinions about syntax and didn't like ML's.

jongraehl 17y ago

I like the (description of) the language. I love statically typed functional languages with type inferencing. But look forward a few years. Hasn't F# definitively won, except for people who prefer Java libraries (Scala), and people who like lazy computation and/or extreme purity (Haskell)? Yes, F# performance in Mono is bad right now. But there's no reason the language itself can't be implemented (perhaps as a skin on top of the Ocaml code base - or does the license not permit it?) The size of a language community does matter. It's not "most popular 1-3 in each niche live, others die" but "15 years from now, will it still exist, or will the 1-3 hardcore hackers have moved on?"

gjm11 17y ago

Seems like a pretty nice language, though it's basically just syntactic sugar for ML. (Not such a bad thing; syntactic sugar is tasty, and I can understand not liking ML syntax much.) I'm a bit put off by the way the documentation repeatedly says "continuation" where it means "closure".

jganetsk 17y ago

In Mythryl unit becomes Void. The value syntax is unchanged: () No! This is a regression into darkness! Unit should stay unit! According to type theorists: Unit is the data type inhabited with exactly one value (the zero-tuple). That's why it's called "unit". Void is the data type not inhabited with any values. Therefore, a function that typechecks to return type Void never terminates, because there is no value it could return. (The use of "void" in mainstream programming languages corresponds to "unit" in academic settings). Also, if our notion of "function" is an expression with exactly one argument and one return value (like in lambda calculus), then tuples come in handy as function arguments. Especially the zero-tuple, for functions with side effects that need no input data. Like... exit () And that syntax is quite familiar. I understand Mythryl still uses this syntax... but don't conflate void and unit.