It was never meant to be a pot-shot, and I have nothing against lisp. I can tell why it reads that way, and we added that in because we wanted to illustrate why people should care.
As to your claim about us being wrong: I don't have an issue with being wrong, and maybe at the same time we are. At the same time, I think it is possible that there are misunderstandings that cause people to believe we aren't doing something new. Again, maybe we're not.
We're two 18 year olds, fresh out of high school. It's a research project, but we're not graduate students.
A lot of these comments are claiming it's not new because reader macros exist. From my understanding, our tokenization system is unique because it can all be done at runtime without backtracking or executing anything instantly, which is possible because cognition always makes use of the text read in, and never makes use of anything not yet read in, which means you don't have to backtrack. I mean, you could backtrack but it would be less elegant.
If I'm wrong about this then that's fine but then we still made something cool without even knowing it existed beforehand.
For a lot of this stuff, there is no "wrong" because it's a matter of taste and familiarity, rather like asking which of the human alphabets is "wrong". It's undoubtedly very clever, a reimagining of lexing from scratch.
On the other hand, I'm adding it to my list of examples of "left handed scissors" languages, along with LISP and FORTH themselves. Languages which a few percent of people regard as more intuitive but most users do not and prefer ALGOL derivatives.
ding! I think the bootstrapping code might've bitten us. Of course there's no
practical reason why we _needed_ to not have the delim flag flipped and a couple
of delimiters defined, but there's a conceptual symmetry in it being the way
it is. Still, I agree in large part with your point.
It seems as though you've read the entire article and understood a decent
portion of it. I'm impressed because I think I explained this suboptimally.
I think it's fine to show that you can do it, I think the main thing is to flip the order a bit.
E.g. "here's a cool thing thing we can do <demonstrate the outcome of significantly changing a readable syntax>" to hook people, "here's how <show how you change syntax with higher level helpers>", "and if you really want to know how to bootstrap this from basics <here comes the linenoise>".
Maybe compare how e.g. Forth is often introduced, with how people describe bootstrapping of a simplistic Forth like Jonesforth or Sectorforth [2]. Showing people how they can define their own words and it fundamentally changes how they work with the language afterwards is cool to a lot of people who have no interest in details like how you an implement even numbers with a minimal set of primitives (e.g. Sectorforth relies on that - it doesn't have builtin numbers[3]).
Both are interesting to me, but I'm weird, and I think for most people it'd be easier to maintain their interest if those two aspects are either separate articles or at least if the bootstrapping is relegated to a standalone section they're clearly told they can skip.
[3] The Sectorforth Hello world defines every numeric constant it needs like this:
: -1 ( x -- x -1 ) dup dup nand dup dup nand and ;
: 0 -1 dup and ;
: 1 -1 dup + dup and ;
: 2 1 1 + ;
: 4 2 2 + ;
: 6 2 4 + ;
Which is fun if you're a language geek. Not so convincing if you want to know if Forth is fort you [EDIT: That mistake was wholly unintentional, but I'll leave it].
Self explanatory grammars: there's the stem-like syntax that I showcase and you could write a lisp like syntax in it pretty easily. I'd imagine you don't want to use this in production yet. As for self explanatory bootstrap code: the bootstrap code is the way it is because cognition doesn't want to assume some complex syntax from the start.
There's a lot to explain, and it has occurred to me that I have explained it in a suboptimal manner. Writer of this post, by the way. The problem is that there is just so much to communicate (the design for this language with Matthew took 3 weeks of back and forth communication over several hours a day). A lot to fill in for people that don't know me in real life.
I’m a non programmer, and while I can often just barely grasp what might possibly be going on in a “normal” language, I can’t even begin to pretend to make sense of what you’ve made. I’m glad some are able to appreciate what you’ve done.
I suspect the reception of it being suspected to be a joke, is the mention of lisp and brainfuck priming them for a joke, combined with examples and concepts that seem to require a much stronger than normal technical background. So for the average Joe it ends up in the “turbo encabulator” zone where it’s not quite clear if what’s going on is real or in jest. The prerequisites for understanding just aren’t there.
I also suspect a non-zero percentage of the readers have involuntarily audio flashbacks of Soulja Boy when they see that many “cranks” on a page.
I thought it was cool if a little impenetrable without extra effort! Reminded me a bit of Urbit’s old theorycraft, which I think is still an open question as to whether it’s an elaborate ruse, so the idea did cross my mind that I’m getting my leg pulled, but it seems to be in earnest. I have some similar thoughts in a related but different domain but user-extensible syntax is certainly a nice and uncommon language feature.
oh yeah, Urbit; I'm quite aware of the project and can recognize that to some I might just be explaining it in an intentionally confusing manner, perhaps. I do think the original intent of Urbit was to naturally select nerds, basically (I mean Curtis Yarvin talking about the old UseNet made it really seem like it), and no, that was not the intent here. It literally is just hard to figure out how to communicate the core concepts of Cognition and why we wanted it to be that way.
Thanks for your feedback! I'm not accusing you of not reading the full article, but you should if you haven't already. Also, we don't know the extent to which we made anything new; if you think you can do what we're doing in lisp in some way, you're free to prove us wrong.
Writer of this article: Thank you! I don't mind the snakry comments. In fact, I welcome them as I think they are pretty funny themselves. We'll most certainly be working on more dark magic in the future.
you're supposed to touch a few nerves. that means you're showing something different to the comfort of most. something really different. two most common reactions to this is irritation and laughter.
Indeed. I am the writer of this blog post and Matthew and I never intended
for this to be a joke. In fact, we thought we had programmed something unique
that nobody had done before, and the bootstrapping code syntax is minimal by
design (you don't want to assume a default complicated syntax).
Since you're here, note that I can't resize your text on Chrome on Android by default, and so I can't read your page on my phone at all without my glasses without switching the browser to desktop mode.
i think you might lose people in the transition from the turing tape machine style bootstrapping to using full "words" for operations. it might help to compare it to something like regexes? (obviously they're not similar in the way that forth / stack langs are, but they're more commonly known and more commonly thought of as useful)
i think it'd also help a lot to have some gifs of the state machine operating on stuff
or maybe you could have something with "syntax" highlighting. a navigable timeline that changes the highlighting based on the current ignore lists and / or stack contents as you step through the code could be neat
Hi, I'm the one that wrote this blog post! A lot of comments treat this project
as a joke or some form of satire, but we've spent 3 months writing this after
initially coming up with the idea because we thought nobody had created such
a general programming language before. It's good to get some feedback and
maybe we've been in our own heads for a little too long, but it's good that
someone gets it.
> we thought nobody had created such a general programming language before
How is this more general than a language like Binary Lambda Calculus, which can bootstrap into any other language, like Brainfuck in 112 bytes of bootstrap, or even into Cognition itself?
I read it as probably containing something deep that I should save for when I have time to go through the details. Maybe we syntaxlings need time to get comfortable.
