7 ms·

The Nit Programming Language

61 points by colund 12y ago

kailuowang 12y ago
I would appreciate if the home page provides the real incentive behind inventing this language. "a robust statically typed programming language where structure is not a pain" is a bit vague and not a unique thing that hasn't been achieved by other existing languages. My current hunch is something like "let's have a static typed language with Ruby syntax," but I am really not sure.
- nitid_name 12y ago
  Mr. Munroe's comments on competing standards comes to mind. http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
  - StefanKarpinski 12y ago
    Good lord, this is so tired. I really don't think that Randall Monroe penned that comic so that any time anyone tried something new people could trot it out to poke fun at them for doing so. Please stop.
- duaneb 12y ago
  I also find it kind of ironic, because one would think they would achieve structure not being a pain with a solid type system, but it seems to be based on multiple inheritance, with no union types. That's fine and everything, but it's hardly going to win any medals around structuring the resulting programs. Also, redefining classes elsewhere is cool and everything until you lose your IDE, and your productivity drops to 0 because your code isn't indexable by rationality.
- infraruby 12y ago
  > let's have a static typed language with Ruby syntax InfraRuby (at http://infraruby.com/live http://infraruby.com/live) is a statically typed Ruby compiler: valid InfraRuby programs are valid Ruby programs.
  - Gurkenmaster 12y ago
    The page only mentions JVM does it also compile to native binaries?
    - infraruby 12y ago
      No. You could use a bytecode compiler (Excelsior JET or RoboVM, for example).
shinta42 12y ago
too many languages to learn... elixir, nim, golang, clojure, haskell, elm, rust......there is no end...
- aruggirello 12y ago
  Vala and Haxe are very promising too.
- pestaa 12y ago
  Do you happen to speak German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and French? You don't need to learn all the programming languages, either. Get a glimpse of a few to discover new ways of thinking, but specialize in a handful only.
  - sebastianconcpt 12y ago
    Better than getting a glimpse on (a random, probably hyped-driven) few, is go to the fundamentals and select them paradigmatically. Do something in each paradigm: Object Oriented, Functional, Logical. Non-paradigmatic languages are strange creatures that will hurt the brain for no real good reason (only a epoch-dependent self-serving one)
  - klibertp 12y ago
    That's utterly wrong comparison! Overall complexity of natural languages is probably HUNDREDS times the one of programming languages. Excluding C++, maybe. And also, with time you begin to be much more efficient in learning languages (that's true for natural languages too!), when it makes no sense really not to learn new languages. That being said you don't really need more than a handful languages (selected for their adherence to various paradigms, as my sibling suggest) if you're not interested in inventing your own language.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Just learn the language for the project based on requirements and tooling. For example, SQL when required to use databases, Objective-C when coding for iOS, Java on Android, JavaScript on the browser, C on UNIX, ... Alternatively, take a CS degree in a good university and enjoy up to 5 years of multiple languages, usually one per CS area/paradigm. On my university we had to program in Pascal, C, C++, Caml Light, Prolog, Java, Smalltalk, Algol, depending on the assignment.
gnuvince 12y ago
I was in a class last year, and one of the grad students was working on Nit and gave us a presentation of the language. It was extremely interesting and seemed quite well designed.
- jp-m 12y ago
  As Ph.D student I have had the fortune to work with people who participated in seminal research on elements of the language, and also have met the author in person. These people are truly brilliant and the learning experience has been great.
asterite 12y ago
Looks nice. Some ideas are very similar to those of Crystal ( http://crystal-lang.org http://crystal-lang.org ) like the automatic type flow. But it seems not to support union types and types are required everywhere (which some might like).
- tachyonbeam 12y ago
  I tried Crystal a while back, found it quite addictive. chuckles
Profpatsch 12y ago
Here are my thoughts after quickly glancing over the „features“: 1. No formatting rules and verbose „end“ I thought that by now it was universally accepted that having clear rules is a good idea, see Python and golang) 2. OO with inheritance 3. multiple at that 4. Dynamic classes/objects 5. Methods inside the classes All of these make reasoning about effects very hard/impossible; Interfaces in golang, Multimethods in Clojure, Typeclasses in Haskell, CLOS in CL all provide a better solution to that. 6. Imperative 7. No functional elements (no functions, only methods) Both mean inherently stateful, which in turn complicates reasoning 8. redef & super It’s dangerous to have behaviour of single methods spread all over your codebase. 9. nullable Looks like an interesting idea to eliminate the class of NPE runtime errors, yet it’s a special language (and syntax!) construct. It therefore does not arise out of the type system, but is explicitely built into the type system, so it doesn’t scale. See Haskell’s Maybe type on how to eleminate NPE’s with a small, trivial type that is no more special than any other. Take it or leave it, these are the things I learned in my study of programming languages. I might be wrong, I might be right, but these are the things that came up as bad design most often in different languages. /me out
- ajuc 12y ago
  > I thought that by now it was universally accepted that having clear rules is a good idea, see Python and golang) It is far from being generaly accepted, see Clojure, Scala, Rust, Ruby, ... I'd say more new languages don't follow this than do. And despite general love for Python its most controversial feature is exactly this.
  - kibwen 12y ago
    Rust has had formatting rules in the vein of PEP 8 for years now, and I'm hoping that an automatic rustfmt will emerge sometime between tomorrow's alpha release and the stable release a few months from now.
    - steveklabnik 12y ago
      Yes, we absolutely want a rustfmt. There's just been higher-priority work to do, and some conventions are still settling out. Gotta know what to format to before you can build a formatter!
yoanizer 12y ago
It is going to take a lot to convince me that the world needs yet another statically typed OO programming language that looks just like any other.
pekk 12y ago
The sales pitch makes it sound like I can have the Java experience without the JVM, with junk like multiple inheritance, using syntax from ALGOL. Where is the "fun" and "painless" and "bug-free" going to come from?
amelius 12y ago
I stopped reading at "object oriented".
- klibertp 12y ago
  And how is this interesting to anyone other than you?
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Suit yourself, remain ignorant.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Tobu 12y ago
http://nitlanguage.org/manual/genericity/ http://nitlanguage.org/manual/genericity/ > Unlike many object-oriented languages, generic classes in Nit yield a kind of sub-typing. For example, Pair[Int] is a subtype of Pair[Object]. Sounds completely broken. What if Pair[E] is contravariant on E? class Pair[E] fun contains(E): Bool fun clamp(E): Bool end > http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/ http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/ (redefining any method) That's spooky action at a distance. It breaks modularity, could cause packaging hell.
- klibertp 12y ago
  Variance: I suspect it's a subject to similar restrictions as in Haxe: http://haxe.org/manual/type-system-variance.html http://haxe.org/manual/type-system-variance.html > That's spooky action at a distance. It breaks modularity, could cause packaging hell. Swift, Ruby, Nimrod and Smalltalk are a few languages - out of many, many more - which disagree with you here.
  - Tobu 12y ago
    Nope. In is_subtype: > # If `sub` is a formal type, then it is accepted if its bound is accepted https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/2323b17d46c873e8c6c41b75d0d9ad0d29b51337/src/model/model.nit#L695 https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/2323b17d46c873e8c6c41b75d... Ruby is dynamic and the interpreter is feature-rich. People are just exercising self-discipline. Nit intends to be “a robust statically typed programming language” which is very different. Also, could you point me to the Nim feature? All I see is overloading.
    - klibertp 12y ago
      > Nope. In is_subtype [...] Oh, ok. So it does look a bit broken then :) > Also, could you point me to the Nim feature? That follows from the fact that `something.method()` is just a syntactic sugar for `method(something)` and that you can write methods for any type anywhere. The example I specifically had in mind was strutils module, which extends a string type with many useful methods. Now that I think about it I'm not sure how Nim would handle two methods of the same name for the same type defined in different places. I think it would refuse to compile such code? But that's a guess only, I'd need to check. EDIT: oh, and I see you complained about redefinition specifically, not about the ability to extend classes in general. Sorry, I somehow missed it.
kornakiewicz 12y ago
Altough I like the idea of writing yourself own language for learning purposes and fun, I don't think it's anyhow better than available toolbox.
drhodes 12y ago
Examples? Found some. https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/examples https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/examples
VMG 12y ago
seeing < and > html escapes here: http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/ http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/
caissy 12y ago
A few of the main contributors are good friends of mine, so this post might be biased. One of the nicest part of Nit in my opinion is their foreign function interface (FFI). It currently supports C and Java out of the box, and Objective-C and C++ are being worked on. I had the chance to work with the FFI a few years ago when it was still a student's master project, and I really had a blast with it. Some librairies such as libcurl[1], curses[2] and sdl[3] were implemented with this FFI. Another great part of this language is a project being worked on by the same guy that built the FFI, and it's a cross-compiler for mobile applications called Gammit[4]. You write your app in Nit and compile to Java and Objective-C natively for Android and iOS application. The iOS part isn't ready yet, but the Android one is quite advanced with a few great examples such as a small Minecraft clone working with Google Cardboard and having multiplayer functionality. [1] https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curl https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curl [2] https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curses https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curses [3] https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/sdl2 https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/sdl2 [4] https://github.com/xymus/nit/tree/gammit https://github.com/xymus/nit/tree/gammit
- xymus 12y ago
  Our Curl module is due for an overhaul. A recent example of the FFI would be the bindings of OpenGL ES 2.0 at https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/glesv2/glesv2.nit https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/glesv2/glesv2.... The partial bindings to the Google Cardboard Java API may also be of interest: https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/android/cardboard.nit https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/android/cardbo...
msravi 12y ago
Anyone knows what the language's performance is like? I couldn't find any benchmarks...
- jwaldrip 12y ago
  Ditto, I would love to know as well.
patrick73 12y ago
so bad.
nickknw 12y ago
Glad to see another language that has chosen to avoid NullPointerExceptions. Some of you might take issue with the way it is implemented (special syntax vs general type), but IMO it is still much better than having NPEs.
dogpa 12y ago
I like that I can start hacking right away after reading the 'not a manual' once. I don't like the 'do' - it's either redundant or inconsistent. Why does 'while' get a 'do' but 'if' doesn't? Or the 'end', especially as it could be a 'while-end' or an 'if-end'. And 'isa' (what was wrong with 'is')? Blech! I like that 'var' is an attribute and the 'fun' is a method. Android support is intriguing. Maybe this seems like small things and I don't know about what the rest of you are talking about. 'contravariant'? huh? But it looks cool to me and I don't think you can ever have too many cool things.
- klibertp 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance_(computer_science) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance_(...
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
The documentation in one big PDF: http://nitlanguage.org/manual/nitreference.pdf http://nitlanguage.org/manual/nitreference.pdf
rurban 12y ago
for i in [0..width[ do for j in [0..height[ do if foo(i, j) then break label outer_loop # The 'break' breaks the 'for i' loop end end label outer_loop ouch. I see why mathematicians would like that, but programmers are surely annoyed by the open range "[". And if the target are mathematicians, they surely dont like the verbose do end blocks, instead of {}. the for loop could be then ∀ x in [0..height[: if foo(i, j): break outer_loop. just odd syntax choices.

61 points by colund 12y ago

I would appreciate if the home page provides the real incentive behind inventing this language. "a robust statically typed programming language where structure is not a pain" is a bit vague and not a unique thing that hasn't been achieved by other existing languages. My current hunch is something like "let's have a static typed language with Ruby syntax," but I am really not sure.

nitid_name 12y ago
Mr. Munroe's comments on competing standards comes to mind. http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
- StefanKarpinski 12y ago
  Good lord, this is so tired. I really don't think that Randall Monroe penned that comic so that any time anyone tried something new people could trot it out to poke fun at them for doing so. Please stop.
duaneb 12y ago
I also find it kind of ironic, because one would think they would achieve structure not being a pain with a solid type system, but it seems to be based on multiple inheritance, with no union types. That's fine and everything, but it's hardly going to win any medals around structuring the resulting programs. Also, redefining classes elsewhere is cool and everything until you lose your IDE, and your productivity drops to 0 because your code isn't indexable by rationality.
infraruby 12y ago
> let's have a static typed language with Ruby syntax InfraRuby (at http://infraruby.com/live http://infraruby.com/live) is a statically typed Ruby compiler: valid InfraRuby programs are valid Ruby programs.
- Gurkenmaster 12y ago
  The page only mentions JVM does it also compile to native binaries?
  - infraruby 12y ago
    No. You could use a bytecode compiler (Excelsior JET or RoboVM, for example).

shinta42 12y ago

too many languages to learn... elixir, nim, golang, clojure, haskell, elm, rust......there is no end...

aruggirello 12y ago
Vala and Haxe are very promising too.
pestaa 12y ago
Do you happen to speak German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and French? You don't need to learn all the programming languages, either. Get a glimpse of a few to discover new ways of thinking, but specialize in a handful only.
- sebastianconcpt 12y ago
  Better than getting a glimpse on (a random, probably hyped-driven) few, is go to the fundamentals and select them paradigmatically. Do something in each paradigm: Object Oriented, Functional, Logical. Non-paradigmatic languages are strange creatures that will hurt the brain for no real good reason (only a epoch-dependent self-serving one)
- klibertp 12y ago
  That's utterly wrong comparison! Overall complexity of natural languages is probably HUNDREDS times the one of programming languages. Excluding C++, maybe. And also, with time you begin to be much more efficient in learning languages (that's true for natural languages too!), when it makes no sense really not to learn new languages. That being said you don't really need more than a handful languages (selected for their adherence to various paradigms, as my sibling suggest) if you're not interested in inventing your own language.
pjmlp 12y ago
Just learn the language for the project based on requirements and tooling. For example, SQL when required to use databases, Objective-C when coding for iOS, Java on Android, JavaScript on the browser, C on UNIX, ... Alternatively, take a CS degree in a good university and enjoy up to 5 years of multiple languages, usually one per CS area/paradigm. On my university we had to program in Pascal, C, C++, Caml Light, Prolog, Java, Smalltalk, Algol, depending on the assignment.

gnuvince 12y ago

I was in a class last year, and one of the grad students was working on Nit and gave us a presentation of the language. It was extremely interesting and seemed quite well designed.

jp-m 12y ago
As Ph.D student I have had the fortune to work with people who participated in seminal research on elements of the language, and also have met the author in person. These people are truly brilliant and the learning experience has been great.

asterite 12y ago

Looks nice. Some ideas are very similar to those of Crystal ( http://crystal-lang.org http://crystal-lang.org ) like the automatic type flow. But it seems not to support union types and types are required everywhere (which some might like).

tachyonbeam 12y ago
I tried Crystal a while back, found it quite addictive. chuckles

Profpatsch 12y ago

Here are my thoughts after quickly glancing over the „features“: 1. No formatting rules and verbose „end“ I thought that by now it was universally accepted that having clear rules is a good idea, see Python and golang) 2. OO with inheritance 3. multiple at that 4. Dynamic classes/objects 5. Methods inside the classes All of these make reasoning about effects very hard/impossible; Interfaces in golang, Multimethods in Clojure, Typeclasses in Haskell, CLOS in CL all provide a better solution to that. 6. Imperative 7. No functional elements (no functions, only methods) Both mean inherently stateful, which in turn complicates reasoning 8. redef & super It’s dangerous to have behaviour of single methods spread all over your codebase. 9. nullable Looks like an interesting idea to eliminate the class of NPE runtime errors, yet it’s a special language (and syntax!) construct. It therefore does not arise out of the type system, but is explicitely built into the type system, so it doesn’t scale. See Haskell’s Maybe type on how to eleminate NPE’s with a small, trivial type that is no more special than any other. Take it or leave it, these are the things I learned in my study of programming languages. I might be wrong, I might be right, but these are the things that came up as bad design most often in different languages. /me out

ajuc 12y ago
> I thought that by now it was universally accepted that having clear rules is a good idea, see Python and golang) It is far from being generaly accepted, see Clojure, Scala, Rust, Ruby, ... I'd say more new languages don't follow this than do. And despite general love for Python its most controversial feature is exactly this.
- kibwen 12y ago
  Rust has had formatting rules in the vein of PEP 8 for years now, and I'm hoping that an automatic rustfmt will emerge sometime between tomorrow's alpha release and the stable release a few months from now.
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    Yes, we absolutely want a rustfmt. There's just been higher-priority work to do, and some conventions are still settling out. Gotta know what to format to before you can build a formatter!

yoanizer 12y ago

It is going to take a lot to convince me that the world needs yet another statically typed OO programming language that looks just like any other.

pekk 12y ago

The sales pitch makes it sound like I can have the Java experience without the JVM, with junk like multiple inheritance, using syntax from ALGOL. Where is the "fun" and "painless" and "bug-free" going to come from?

amelius 12y ago

I stopped reading at "object oriented".

klibertp 12y ago
And how is this interesting to anyone other than you?
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
Suit yourself, remain ignorant.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Tobu 12y ago

http://nitlanguage.org/manual/genericity/ http://nitlanguage.org/manual/genericity/ > Unlike many object-oriented languages, generic classes in Nit yield a kind of sub-typing. For example, Pair[Int] is a subtype of Pair[Object]. Sounds completely broken. What if Pair[E] is contravariant on E? class Pair[E] fun contains(E): Bool fun clamp(E): Bool end > http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/ http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/ (redefining any method) That's spooky action at a distance. It breaks modularity, could cause packaging hell.

klibertp 12y ago
Variance: I suspect it's a subject to similar restrictions as in Haxe: http://haxe.org/manual/type-system-variance.html http://haxe.org/manual/type-system-variance.html > That's spooky action at a distance. It breaks modularity, could cause packaging hell. Swift, Ruby, Nimrod and Smalltalk are a few languages - out of many, many more - which disagree with you here.
- Tobu 12y ago
  Nope. In is_subtype: > # If `sub` is a formal type, then it is accepted if its bound is accepted https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/2323b17d46c873e8c6c41b75d0d9ad0d29b51337/src/model/model.nit#L695 https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/2323b17d46c873e8c6c41b75d... Ruby is dynamic and the interpreter is feature-rich. People are just exercising self-discipline. Nit intends to be “a robust statically typed programming language” which is very different. Also, could you point me to the Nim feature? All I see is overloading.
  - klibertp 12y ago
    > Nope. In is_subtype [...] Oh, ok. So it does look a bit broken then :) > Also, could you point me to the Nim feature? That follows from the fact that `something.method()` is just a syntactic sugar for `method(something)` and that you can write methods for any type anywhere. The example I specifically had in mind was strutils module, which extends a string type with many useful methods. Now that I think about it I'm not sure how Nim would handle two methods of the same name for the same type defined in different places. I think it would refuse to compile such code? But that's a guess only, I'd need to check. EDIT: oh, and I see you complained about redefinition specifically, not about the ability to extend classes in general. Sorry, I somehow missed it.

kornakiewicz 12y ago

Altough I like the idea of writing yourself own language for learning purposes and fun, I don't think it's anyhow better than available toolbox.

drhodes 12y ago

Examples? Found some. https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/examples https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/examples

VMG 12y ago

seeing < and > html escapes here: http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/ http://nitlanguage.org/refinement/

caissy 12y ago

A few of the main contributors are good friends of mine, so this post might be biased. One of the nicest part of Nit in my opinion is their foreign function interface (FFI). It currently supports C and Java out of the box, and Objective-C and C++ are being worked on. I had the chance to work with the FFI a few years ago when it was still a student's master project, and I really had a blast with it. Some librairies such as libcurl[1], curses[2] and sdl[3] were implemented with this FFI. Another great part of this language is a project being worked on by the same guy that built the FFI, and it's a cross-compiler for mobile applications called Gammit[4]. You write your app in Nit and compile to Java and Objective-C natively for Android and iOS application. The iOS part isn't ready yet, but the Android one is quite advanced with a few great examples such as a small Minecraft clone working with Google Cardboard and having multiplayer functionality. [1] https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curl https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curl [2] https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curses https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/curses [3] https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/sdl2 https://github.com/privat/nit/tree/master/lib/sdl2 [4] https://github.com/xymus/nit/tree/gammit https://github.com/xymus/nit/tree/gammit

xymus 12y ago
Our Curl module is due for an overhaul. A recent example of the FFI would be the bindings of OpenGL ES 2.0 at https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/glesv2/glesv2.nit https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/glesv2/glesv2.... The partial bindings to the Google Cardboard Java API may also be of interest: https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/android/cardboard.nit https://github.com/privat/nit/blob/master/lib/android/cardbo...

msravi 12y ago

Anyone knows what the language's performance is like? I couldn't find any benchmarks...

jwaldrip 12y ago
Ditto, I would love to know as well.

patrick73 12y ago

so bad.

nickknw 12y ago

Glad to see another language that has chosen to avoid NullPointerExceptions. Some of you might take issue with the way it is implemented (special syntax vs general type), but IMO it is still much better than having NPEs.

dogpa 12y ago

I like that I can start hacking right away after reading the 'not a manual' once. I don't like the 'do' - it's either redundant or inconsistent. Why does 'while' get a 'do' but 'if' doesn't? Or the 'end', especially as it could be a 'while-end' or an 'if-end'. And 'isa' (what was wrong with 'is')? Blech! I like that 'var' is an attribute and the 'fun' is a method. Android support is intriguing. Maybe this seems like small things and I don't know about what the rest of you are talking about. 'contravariant'? huh? But it looks cool to me and I don't think you can ever have too many cool things.

klibertp 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance_(computer_science) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance_and_contravariance_(...

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

The documentation in one big PDF: http://nitlanguage.org/manual/nitreference.pdf http://nitlanguage.org/manual/nitreference.pdf

rurban 12y ago

for i in [0..width[ do for j in [0..height[ do if foo(i, j) then break label outer_loop # The 'break' breaks the 'for i' loop end end label outer_loop ouch. I see why mathematicians would like that, but programmers are surely annoyed by the open range "[". And if the target are mathematicians, they surely dont like the verbose do end blocks, instead of {}. the for loop could be then ∀ x in [0..height[: if foo(i, j): break outer_loop. just odd syntax choices.