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CommunityNews

Yatima: A programming language for the decentralized web

In one sense, the Truth Mines were just another indexscape. Hundreds of thousands of specialized selections of the library’s contents were accessible in similar ways–and Yatima had climbed the Evolutionary Tree, hopscotched the Periodic Table, walked the avenue-like Timelines for the histories of fleshers, gleisners, and citizens. Half a megatau before, ve’d swum through the Eukaryotic Cell; every protein, every nucleotide, even carbohydrate drifting through the cytoplasm had broadcast gestalt tags with references to everything the library had to say about the molecule in question.

In the Truth Mines, though, the tags weren’t just references; they included complete statements of the particular definitions, axioms, or theorems the objects represented. The Mines were self-contained: every mathematical result that fleshers and their descendants had ever proven was on display in its entirety. The library’s exegesis was helpful-but the truths themselves were all here.

Diaspora, Greg Egan

Yatima is a pure functional programming language implemented in Rust with the following features:

  • Content-Addressing powers reproducible builds, and peer-to-peer package management. A Yatima content-address represents an immutable program and all its dependencies. That means if someones shares an address with you, you can perfectly replicate their computation (and in principle even their computing environment!). Since the program is immutable, the way it runs the first time is the way it runs everytime.
  • First-class types. This lets you the programmer to tell the compiler what you intend to do in your program. Then, like a helpful robot assistant, the compiler will check to make sure that what you’re actually doingmatches those expressed intentions. Type-driven programming lets the compiler act as your “correctness exocortex”, i.e. a cognitive augmentation that helps you catch your mistakes.
  • Linear, affine and erased types give you fine-grained control over resource usage during execution. Substructural types allow you to get the memory safety benefits of using a high-level language, while also allowing you to work “close to the metal” when you want to.
  • Type-safe dependent metaprogramming lets Yatima have the flexibility and extensibility of a dynamically-typed language, without sacrificing the safety of static-typing.

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Korbin73

Korbin73

People should try and do some work instead. Too much languages is a bad thing, a diffusion of good will and energy in too many directions.

It could also make it easier to innovate. Languages are absorbing features from each other all the time. It’s harder to mutate (pun intended) an existing language to express and idea than creating a new language that keeps those ideas front and center since it was built with those ideas in mind.

As an example, I quit doing C# dev after 13 years because I got tired of waiting for them to add features like immutable types, discriminated unions, null safety, and first class functions. Swift/Kotlin are newer languages and have all of those features. A few years ago I watched a Q & A session online with the creator of C# and he was answering the question of C# turning in to F# and his answer was that C# is an OO language at it’s core, you can’t change the fundamental basis of the language.

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

But that’s exactly my point: adding a ton of new languages contributes to this same problem. One day people might be completely in love with them but the core team will likely not be interested in adding whatever the language was eventually found to be lacking.

I agree that some of the new languages are good innovations but IMO most are just noise and a product of somebody getting overly excited over a single concept.

AstonJ

AstonJ

Yatima looks interesting.

Added a #new-languages tag so we can keep track of new languages before deciding which ones to create portals for :nerd_face:

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