gavinhoward's comments

On: The Heart of Unix (2018)

[gavinhoward]

> I hope to see more "sugar" in languages to take advantage of calling out to other programs for help.

How about [1] and [2]?

My language has those because its first program was its own build script, which requires calling out to a C compiler. It had that before printing to stdout.

Turns out, that made it far more powerful than I imagined without a standard library. Calling out to separate programs is far better than a standard library.

[1]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/commit/95904ef79701024857...

[2]: https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/commit/95904ef79701024857...

On: GnuCash 5.9

[gavinhoward]

This is absolutely a valid reason to not use GnuCash.

As for myself, I agree that the XML format is not great, but I use the SQLite format, which allows me to write scripts on it.

[ranger_danger → gavinhoward]

You can write scripts to transform XML documents as well.

[gavinhoward → ranger_danger]

True, but I don't want to. And that is the biggest barrier of all.

[cryptonector → gavinhoward]

I was going to say what GP said, but, yeah, XSLT is just no fun to write by comparison to SQL.

[atemerev → cryptonector]

Hardly anybody was using XSLT even when XML was all the rage. Python scripts work just fine.

[cryptonector → atemerev]

XSLT 1 was very limited. XSLT 2 was too late. That's my take. I actually like XSLT 2, but it's so verbose... -- it's horrible.

Once in a while I dream of adding proper XML support to jq just to be able to use jq as a pithy alternative to XSLT.

[smartmic → cryptonector]

XQuery is easier and can be fun to use!

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

> Serious mode off. When will we get Yao in the Linux kernel?

As soon as someone pays me long enough to get it there. :)

I only have 3 hours max a day (usually only 2) to work on Yao. And I have other projects I want to do as well.

But if someone paid, I sure could find the desire to work on it.

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

The post answers that.

Every unmarked function can do anything. If you add a new thing that functions can do, you assume unmarked functions can do it (even if they don't), and you add a trait for the negative.

[cryptonector → gavinhoward]

Thanks, I got interrupted in my reading.

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

I only have one Perl script in that repo...

Anyway, Yzena is my business. I am not a very good marketer, and the website is bad.

I also don't think I will get any business, but eh.

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

Programs written in Yao.

[kibwen → gavinhoward]

If the goal is portability, Google pursued the idea of distributing cross-platform LLVM IR via PNaCl and ultimately abandoned it, because LLVM IR isn't really designed for portability.

[gavinhoward → kibwen]

I designed my own, uncreatively called Yvm. Yao already compiles to it.

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

Good question.

Yao's concurrency will be explicit. You will not get concurrency unless you open a threadset and spawn threads. Yao scripts run in a single thread by default.

I focused on solving the concurrency problem because if it is solved, single thread code is solved as well.

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

Fair criticisms, John. I just want to address macros.

Yao has something like Rust's macros. They are called "keywords," because even the built-in keywords are implemented that way. (That is why Yao can just not have a `while` keyword.)

My Yao-based build system, Rig, uses keywords to implement a build DSL. [1]

And keywords are fast to compile.

[1]: https://rigbuild.dev/build.rig5/#keywords

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

Please don't jump to Yao! The only thing it's good for right now is to replace shell scripts.

On: Rewriting Rust: A Response

[gavinhoward]

I wish I could upvote you twice.

I decided on my values because of bcantrill's talk. Everyone should watch it.

A more complete list of my values is at https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/src/branch/master/docs/adl/00... .

[andai → gavinhoward]

Could you elaborate on value #0 being users (and what it means to prioritize users over programmers)?

[gavinhoward → andai]

Good question. I will add that.

It means that users' convenience comes before my convenience. (I am the programmer in question.)

This means that if there is something I could do to make things easier on users, I do it, even if it is a lot more work for me.

An example is https://git.yzena.com/Yzena/Yc/commit/c9086af225d42b2f125959... . Comments in Yao do not use the `#` character, but I added the shebang to the parser specially so that scripts could be run just like any others scripts.

[timeon → gavinhoward]

This is nice to see. I often came across opposite sentiment here. "Dev time is precious, user is OK with un-performant/etc. software."

[gavinhoward → timeon]

Thank you for your kind words!