4 ms·

The Snow Programming Language

18 points by bkudria 17y ago

albertcardona 17y ago
Snow _could_ be great. Its delivery as a completely unfinished project, though, gives it an air of non-seriousness. Compare, for instance, with the first public release of Clojure, which was very usable for everyday programming, and came along with detailed explanations on the rational and motivations behind the creation of the new language.
mahmud 17y ago
Only runs on x86-64 architectures and operating systems. Only runs on POSIX-compliant operating systems. Snow currently requires the experimental GCC version 4.4 Snow also could have benefited from being prototyped in Awk and Sed first. How can you be influenced by "Smalltalk, Python, Ruby and JavaScript", and still end up writing your compiler in C++? Good luck to the author, if this is a first attempt (but compiler writing != language design.)
jcw 17y ago
What exactly is interesting about this language? The two strongest qualities I see (easy binding with dlopen and parallelization) are unimplemented, and already exist in similar languages.
Virax 17y ago
I can't buy into a language that uses colon for assignment.
- cschep 17y ago
  +1, I had a really hard time reading through even the simple examples!
- bkudria 17y ago
  I thought it was kinda interesting. Do any other languages do this?
  - klipt 17y ago
    Maxima does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29
- rdtsc 17y ago
  I like it. Using '=' for assignment makes less sense than using <- or := or : because traditionally (i.e. mathematically) '=' work like a declaration or a constraint. Then there is the confusion between = and == that has always resulted in countless bugs. Of course, assignment is a very common operation and I would rather use 1 char (:) for it rather than two (<-, :=).
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
die_sekte 17y ago
No Snow Crash joke yet? I'm disappointed. And besides, I'm not sure what this is good for.
gaius 17y ago
You instantiate an object and then poke methods into it? Ever heard of umm, classes?
- blasdel 17y ago
  Classism is the cancer that is killing OOP
- almost 17y ago
  Prototype-based OOP is an alternative to class-based OOP. See the Self, Javascript and IO languages for examples. I'm not making any claims as to which is "better", just pointing out that it's a valid way of doing things.
judofyr 17y ago
First of all I should say that it's unfortunate that this is spreading while it's still very much in alpha. But hey, they did put the website there and this is the internett. I also feel that I should clarify some parts since it's not completely up to date: It's prototype-based at core, but will have a class system built upon the prototype-infrastructure. The C++ version supports 32bit now, but more interesting, they're rewritig it in pure C. See the mailing list for more details (snow-dev at Google Groups). And just to make it crystal clear: This isn't a release. They just wanted to create a site to give some information on the project, and some guys decided to post this to Reddit/HN. It's still far away from 0.1.

18 points by bkudria 17y ago

Snow _could_ be great. Its delivery as a completely unfinished project, though, gives it an air of non-seriousness. Compare, for instance, with the first public release of Clojure, which was very usable for everyday programming, and came along with detailed explanations on the rational and motivations behind the creation of the new language.

mahmud 17y ago

Only runs on x86-64 architectures and operating systems. Only runs on POSIX-compliant operating systems. Snow currently requires the experimental GCC version 4.4 Snow also could have benefited from being prototyped in Awk and Sed first. How can you be influenced by "Smalltalk, Python, Ruby and JavaScript", and still end up writing your compiler in C++? Good luck to the author, if this is a first attempt (but compiler writing != language design.)

jcw 17y ago

What exactly is interesting about this language? The two strongest qualities I see (easy binding with dlopen and parallelization) are unimplemented, and already exist in similar languages.

Virax 17y ago

I can't buy into a language that uses colon for assignment.

cschep 17y ago
+1, I had a really hard time reading through even the simple examples!
bkudria 17y ago
I thought it was kinda interesting. Do any other languages do this?
- klipt 17y ago
  Maxima does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29
rdtsc 17y ago
I like it. Using '=' for assignment makes less sense than using <- or := or : because traditionally (i.e. mathematically) '=' work like a declaration or a constraint. Then there is the confusion between = and == that has always resulted in countless bugs. Of course, assignment is a very common operation and I would rather use 1 char (:) for it rather than two (<-, :=).
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

die_sekte 17y ago

No Snow Crash joke yet? I'm disappointed. And besides, I'm not sure what this is good for.

gaius 17y ago

You instantiate an object and then poke methods into it? Ever heard of umm, classes?

blasdel 17y ago
Classism is the cancer that is killing OOP
almost 17y ago
Prototype-based OOP is an alternative to class-based OOP. See the Self, Javascript and IO languages for examples. I'm not making any claims as to which is "better", just pointing out that it's a valid way of doing things.

judofyr 17y ago

First of all I should say that it's unfortunate that this is spreading while it's still very much in alpha. But hey, they did put the website there and this is the internett. I also feel that I should clarify some parts since it's not completely up to date: It's prototype-based at core, but will have a class system built upon the prototype-infrastructure. The C++ version supports 32bit now, but more interesting, they're rewritig it in pure C. See the mailing list for more details (snow-dev at Google Groups). And just to make it crystal clear: This isn't a release. They just wanted to create a site to give some information on the project, and some guys decided to post this to Reddit/HN. It's still far away from 0.1.