Yet another Hacker News

Bespoke: A programming language for people who say please

67 points birdculture 3 days ago 23 comments

az09mugen 23 hours ago | parent

Idea first developed by intercal, which there are no reference to : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

wduquette 2 hours ago | parent

This isn't Intercal, this is an advanced version of AppleScript.

rf15 3 hours ago | parent

We already have that, it's called intercal.

layer8 3 hours ago | parent

The Table of Contents sent me into an infinite recursion.

benzguo 3 hours ago | parent

i loved this

KeenanKeenan 2 hours ago | parent

>Programming has developed an unfortunate tone.

> We kill processes, abort transactions, throw exceptions, break out of loops, and execute instructions.

Can't wait to see the fork of this project that doubles down on hostile language /s

gjtorikian 2 hours ago | parent

for the agentic user, there's also PATY: https://gjtorikian.online/paty/

rnzaou 2 hours ago | parent

really good, i'm having a good laugh rn

spinningslate 1 hour ago | parent

Same here:

> Colour is the namespace for values of A Distinguished Colour. Color is evidence that the source has arrived without a proper education.

Laughed unreasonably hard at that. Been a less than pleasantly civilised day at work, this was the relief I didn’t know I needed.

RickJWagner 1 hour ago | parent

I might be a potential user. I find myself being polite in AI prompts sometimes.

I guess it can’t hurt, just more practice at polite interactions. ( The prompt phrasing, not the language. )

bigfishrunning 47 minutes ago | parent

This article was an indication that we're not going to make it. People, I mean. https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt

classified 1 hour ago | parent

No wonder so much of our software is rubbish when we treat the compiler and the runtime environment with so much neglect. By disrespecting them, we alienate the entities we rely upon most. I foresee a huge surge in software quality once the Bespoke language goes mainstream.

pixelpoet 1 hour ago | parent

Hear, hear! I should very much like to see the Linux kernel adopt Bespoke instead of that terribly uncouth Rust manner of speaking, like a mouth full of nails.

220hertz 1 hour ago | parent

Automatic garbage collection is not assumed; one formally engages the groundskeeper.

Fantastic.

pixelpoet 1 hour ago | parent

Spelt, not spelled; tisk tisk ;)

I love everything about this!

sltkr 22 minutes ago | parent

The AI that generated this slop doesn't understand regional dialects of English.

bigfishrunning 1 hour ago | parent

> --quiet suppresses compliments, never criticism.

It's the only way to grow.

vova_hn2 1 hour ago | parent

Somewhat related: "If PHP Were British" (2011) - https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/

My favorite part:

  would_you_mind {
      // Code here
  } actually_i_do_mind (Exception £e) {
      // Politely move on
      cheerio('Message');
  }

Past HN discussions:

- May 28, 2019 - 46 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029836

- Dec 2, 2022 - 366 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828509

broken-kebab 53 minutes ago | parent

I think "A Regrettable Circumstance" is genuinely better description than "Exception"

tristenharr 44 minutes ago | parent

Love this!! :) I thought about being that verbose in Logos lang, but I think language design changes a lot in the modern era.

I suspect we end up with modular compilers, v0.11.0 of logos lang coming soon with some big updates! We have one frontend which is our Logos language, then the intermediate representation a register VM Bytecode IR, then from that we generate Rust, C, and we have a JIT that will just in time directly to RISC-V, Tenstorrent, we’ve been messing with plasticine, and hoping to get our hands on some sambanova RDU’s. We’re burning our language to a chip.

For fun maybe I’ll add a bespoke dialect :p

https://logicaffeine.com/guide

tristenharr 27 minutes ago | parent

Technically the Rust codegen is from the AST, but then we want to base our other backends on the bytecode VM, although that experiment might get lifted back to the AST, I just am trying to think of the best portable format. We have a treewalker, then I wrote a register based bytecode VM, then from there we did a copy-patch JIT with stencils that can hot-tier to native, and that was the interpreter side, our compiler we have a 40+ pass AOT optimizing supercompiler for Logos to Rust codegen and then we added the C backend, but then I started thinking… if I make it so I can run the optimizer passes then it goes into the VM’s bytecode IR, I could get my optimization passes on all the backends I add for free by generating the code from the IR, so I’ve been experimenting with having our rust codegen from the AST, and the C codegens from the bytecode IR which has the passes applied because they share the core optimization primitives.

It’s a fun experiment but I might go back to the C codegen from the AST as it maintains more useful information that I can use comp-time for more optimizations, but the idea of modular languages and compiler backends interests me. Languages can have “bespoke” front ends quite literally, pick your flavor because really a lot of the flavor can be handled at the parser, and you can have a big nasty language surface area if the parser can clean things up or AOT some of the sugar away. Interesting the idea of sugar in language design as well, we can sprinkle sugar in ways we couldn’t before at all. I just added a bunch of ML primitives for our new CUDA-JIT backend that lets us lower quantized INT8 GEMM’s onto spatial compute fabrics.

Man it’s a crazy time to be alive, I’m not sure how long this period of history will last, but building with an army of agents is amazing.

Last night I for the first time in a while decided to write a little program by hand and after about 30 minutes I had it working but the AI can spit that out in seconds. I admit I’m rusty, that would’ve taken me 5-10 mins at the peak of my degenerate coder phase but the amount you can accomplish now is unparalleled throughout history. When I used to trad code transpilers sometimes single lines would take hours of thinking and work and many lines of iteration to get to. Now I can add an entire new chip architecture as a compile target in a couple weeks.

sltkr 23 minutes ago | parent

Less AI slop please.

WhyComboNadir 20 minutes ago | parent

Love it.

Compared to regular programming languages it reminds me of the difference between lawn signs in the US vs the UK:

US: Keep Off Grass! UK: Please remain on the footpath for the sake of our lawn