
Quorum: The world's first evidence-oriented programming language - doty
http://www.quorumlanguage.com/
======
payne92
I would strongly suggest having a paragraph, right on the home page,
explaining what an "evidence-oriented" language is and how it differs from
conventional languages.

In other words, consider looking at your home page through the eye of someone
who knows NOTHING about what you are doing.

~~~
avn2109
Amen. Also, zooming on the "about" page is super broken on desktop Chrome, the
text does not reflow after zooming in.

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blixt
Here's the explanation of the "evidence-oriented" wording for people who also
had a hard time finding it:
[http://www.quorumlanguage.com/evidence.php](http://www.quorumlanguage.com/evidence.php)

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golemotron
I'm going to call B.S. on this approach. When you look at the language it
looks suspiciously like most other programming languages in terms of syntax.

What it's telling us is that the evidence is that most people kind of like
their own programming language and want to modify nits.

The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully different.
They certainly are not going to find anything that aligns with real ergonomic
research into language design, like that done by PPIG (
[http://www.ppig.org/](http://www.ppig.org/) ) and other groups.

~~~
jack9
> it looks suspiciously like most other programming languages in terms of
> syntax.

Why would this be a criticism? Many languages have been aligning syntactically
for decades.

> The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully
> different.

Given their rigorous evidenciary method is a byline "Submitted claims will be
examined by experts in potentially a variety of fields (e.g., statistics,
experimental design, psychology, computer science).", that's likely.

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guscost
Looks like an attempt to introduce some measure of scientific rigor to the
design-by-committee paradigm, with a new programming language as its goal.
Interesting, it could lead to some good ideas.

I'll wager that it won't be possible to assess many of the choices involved in
a completely objective way, since the participants in each study will have
prejudices and familiarities which will bias the results. Because of the
science-oriented positioning, my guess is this language will be somewhat like
Python (not that that is a bad thing).

~~~
chubot
Your summary seems accurate, but if we are understanding correctly, I don't
think what they're attempting is even possible.

The problem is that all the features of a language interact, and scientific
experiments try to isolate variables. So you will end up with a bunch of
choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.

If someone can provide an example of evidence-based language design, I'd be
interested. But right now I don't really see it.

Why not have an evidence-based car or plane design? Like programming
languages, these things are complex enough that they require historical
exemplars and rules of thumb. You can't really expect to explore the design
space from scratch.

~~~
guscost
> So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but
> an incoherent whole.

That's a plausible outcome. It may not be possible to design a best-in-class
language without some kind of top-down planning, or even without an auteur
like Matz or Hejlsberg managing the vision part. "Benevolent dictators" are
also common in large and successful software projects, so maybe there's
something to that.

However, it's also possible that relying on formal empiricism for language
design will lead to at least a few breakthroughs. It might require another
auteur to synthesize them into a great language, but the discovery would still
be valuable.

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alariccole
Subjective-C?

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hardwaresofton
This is basically a crowd-sourced programming language with fact-checking (by
experimentation, on proposals before they are added).

A reductive explanation, yes, but I don't think it's inaccurate, based on what
I could find on their site. Would love to be corrected if there's some large
part I missed.

As far as actually constructive criticism, I'd really love it if this was the
first thing I saw on quorumlang's homepage.

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c0ur7n3y
A quick look through the docs didn't tell me what is special about this.

~~~
pc2g4d
It seems they're trying to design a programming language based on usability
studies in academic literature?

These feels like a terrible idea. Language designer now equals literature
reviewer. But who knows, maybe they'll come up with something good?

Some sample code:

    
    
      text dna = "GATTACA"
      text msg = "Welcome to " + dna
      output msg
    

Unfortunately the interpreter at [0] isn't working ("Error: Could not connect
to server:")

[0]
[http://www.quorumlanguage.com/documents/hourofcode/part1.php](http://www.quorumlanguage.com/documents/hourofcode/part1.php)

 _EDIT: fix code formatting_

~~~
alextgordon
Err, so if `type expr` is a variable declaration and `function expr` is a
function call, how are you supposed to tell the difference between them?

~~~
pc2g4d
Perhaps by the limited vocabulary from which `type` can be drawn, i.e. don't
name your function `text` ?

~~~
alextgordon
It doesn't have user-defined types?!

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h4xr
"Programming languages should be designed with human factors as a primary
concern.

Traditional programming languages have been designed predominately with
technical concepts and machines in mind. While such concerns are obviously
critical, human beings ultimately use such tools in the broad development
community. In evidence-oriented programming, human factors evidence takes a
first-class seat in the language's design. All factors related to programming
are considered, up for debate, and are subject to change if a community member
shows rigorous evidence that another approach is better. This is true both for
technical and human factors considerations. To our knowledge, Quorum is the
first programming language to attempt this."

[http://quorumlanguage.com/evidence.php](http://quorumlanguage.com/evidence.php)

So Quorum refers to developers coming to an consensus on what programming
approach is better technical or not..

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drivingmenuts
Isn't this how the world wound up with Ada?

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zenogais
My thoughts exactly. The resemblance is pretty striking.

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renox
While in theory, it seems a good idea, in practice I'm not so sure about their
results: for example using '+' for string concatenation while present in many
languages is IMHO a bad idea: D use '~' instead: much cleaner to distinguish
addition and concatenation otherwise x[] + y[] is ambiguous: element wise
addition, concatenation? Who knows..

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1wd
Looks interesting but sadly I couldn't find even one example of how evidence
influenced the design.

~~~
wmf
IIRC their first experiments focused on the names of keywords and types, where
they found, e.g. that "text" is a more familiar type name than "string".
Presumably they'll later apply the same approach to syntax and then semantics.

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travjones
I'm still trying to figure out what an "evidence-oriented programming
language" is...

~~~
shaftoe
Apparently they're basing this design on experimental feedback from
programmers or something.

I'm skeptical of this going anywhere, but it's an interesting academic
exercise.

~~~
trhway
>Apparently they're basing this design on experimental feedback from
programmers or something.

reminds about that quote of Ford and horse carriage.

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acd
What about the coq proof assistant that must have been before this

[https://coq.inria.fr](https://coq.inria.fr)

