
The Nile Programming Language - ingve
https://github.com/damelang/nile
======
trymas
I've seen it from Alan Kay's talk 'Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make
it "Complicated"?' [0]

Though GH repo is not updated for more than 3 years and maybe it's just my
inexperience or I am spoiled, but from lack of proper documentation I have no
idea how to setup and use this language? On what platforms does it work?

Also looking in the examples, it looks somewhat APL'ish due to use of special
characters. How do I type them (and do it quick) on regular laptop?

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY)

~~~
TuringTest
Thanks for the link. I had problems understanding what Nile was all about from
reading the slides, which provide very little in terms of context and
explanations.

Watching that talk and hearing that Nile is a declarative streaming language
from the research group where Bret Victor works, I now understand what are the
practical applications of such language.

~~~
sparkie
Here's a more interesting demo of Gezira:
[http://tinlizzie.org/~bert/Gezira.ogv](http://tinlizzie.org/~bert/Gezira.ogv)

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amelius
I'm wondering why this was implemented as a language, rather than as a library
in, say, Python or Haskell.

Is "streaming" something that is overlooked in conventional programming
languages?

~~~
orbifold
I think the philosophy behind it is that they (View Point Research Institute)
want(ed?) to be able to create lots of domain specific programming languages
_easily_. So being able to implement those little languages from scratch and
not as part of an existing language was part of the research effort, not just
the language itself.

They have created tools like OMeta2 for this purpose, because they think that
this way every problem is expressed in the natural language of the problem
domain. A huge compiler like GHC with its >= 100.000 lines of code runs also
against the goal of creating a system that needs orders of magnitude less code
(I think their initial budget was ~10000 lines of code).

~~~
TuringTest
The Viewpoints Research Institute is going to be the Xerox PARC of our
generation.

They're developing this really cool computing model which is user-friendly and
extendable, and it just makes sense for removing unnecessary details in
programming, allowing you to center on one aspect of the program at a time -
reducing complexity in a way that classic text-based languages + IDEs are not
able.

It improves the current state of interaction with computers, in the same way
that PARC's windowing desktop with direct manipulation improved over the
existing form-based applications of the time. I expect the next 30 years of
computing tools to be heavily based on that model.

~~~
cloudmike
You might consider shifting some of your enthusiasm from VPRI to CDG Labs,
where a fascinating group has come together around Alan Kay.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-
looks-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-to-
xerox-for-r-d-inspiration-builds-idea-lab)

~~~
TuringTest
Yeah - I'm already following the development of Apparatus, the visually
programmable slide editor. I didn't know they were related through Alan Kay,
but it doesn't surprise me to learn it. :-)

[1]
[https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus](https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus)

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danschuller
Neat. The speed-up with respect to cores is particularly impressive (though it
would be interesting to know the exact conditions. Or is just some type of
average-case?)

------
sklogic
A very well designed DSL. And I did not know about Maru before, it's quite
impressive.

