Stanford Seminar - Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal

What people said

carapace · 2022-07 · Strong recommendation

I didn't see it linked from the article, Jon Purdy has a great talk about this too: "Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal" (2017) [VIDEO] There's also "A Conversation with Manfred von Thun" [LINK] which is worth reading (IMO) if you're interested in concatenative languages. He's the creator of Joy. I've been working with Joy over the last few years now and I really think there's something there. It seems to combine the best features of both Forth and Lisp.

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carapace · 2022-05 · Recommendation

Hear, hear! Wise words from the genius who created Turing Drawings. It's becoming more and more important to treat complexity as a kind of technical debt that has the potential at any moment to metastasize into eldritch horror. I've been playing with what you could call a minimalist programming language: Joy created by Manfred von Thun (who was a philosophy professor! See "A Conversation with Manfred von Thun" [LINK] ) It combines features of Lisp and Forth, and I suspect it may be the simplest useful language. The syntax is enormously simple, and the semantics are likewise simple. It's easy to reason about functions and derive them in a mathematical way using simple algebra, so it's hard to introduce bugs. I recently found a very good 2017 talk by Jon Purdy describing concatinative programming and it's quirks and (potential) advantages: Stanford Seminar - "Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal" [VIDEO] Anyway, it's made me "allergic" to complexity. I tried Rust. Wrote the beginning of a Joy interpreter. I paused for a month and came back to it and it had become Greek to me, and I can't read Greek. :( Now part of that is just I 'm getting old, but a lot of it is the complexity of Rust. I don't want to pick on Rust though, complexity itself is the enemy (Rust is, if anything, an improvement on most of what has come before it, eh? I think only Ada can really be said to be Rust's peer?)

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nemo1618 · 2020-01 · Recommendation

I don't know if it's Baader-Meinhof or what, but I'm seeing concatenative languages all over the place now. Which is great, because now I'm planning to write my own! My gut says that a concatenative language could be ideal for competitive programming, where you want to quickly apply various transformations to your input and immediately see the result. Here's a talk I watched recently describing some of the neat mathematical properties of concatenative languages: [VIDEO]

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