Omega - Language of the Future

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4088

by alrex021 • 16 years ago

68 40 16 years ago

The first thing I want to see when I hear about a new programming language is an example. The best examples of Omega that I've found so far are part of the test suite for the interpreter:

http://code.google.com/p/omega/source/browse/#svn/trunk/test...

wkornewald3• 16 years ago

Reading code like that makes me want to puke. So, he wants to increase productivity by making us think about and write theorems in addition to our normal code (don't underestimate the time you invest in this), making our code even more static and less reusable in the hope that the reduction in time for bug hunting and testing will make up for the time invested in thinking about and creating more complex code? Hard to believe. Do those language designers create this stuff to show off how intelligent they are or just for the sake of having fun or are they seriously trying to make development easier? I can't imagine building a website with this. But then again, maybe those languages are designed for satellites, space shuttles, and simulations (i.e. where correctness is far more important than productivity)? Well, I think most of us have to make a compromise between productivity and correctness. It's the same as having 100% code coverage. Nice in theory, but it makes refactorings and development too costly and still doesn't guarantee that your software is 100% correct. Here's a nice post if you still believe 100% code coverage is the ultimate #1 goal of your project: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cashto/archive/2009/03/31/it-s-ok-no...

aaronblohowiak• 16 years ago

aggree with most of what you said.

As a matter of finesse, I think that the correctness vs productivity argument is a specious one when it comes to language design. If correctness is a business requirement then providing language support is a productivity booster for the team (when you consider the timelines of the verification process as part of the development time.) you alluded to different problem domains perhaps requiring formal proof, I just want to suggest that it may decrease the iteration time for the team as a whole.

silentbicycle2• 16 years ago

I think most of the programming advantages from static typing come from the basics (when done well), rather than the high-end research project type system stuff. A language with inferred (H-M-ish) static types and a good module system will give you reality checks from the compiler, you won't have to write frigging null checks everywhere, and it will avoid the visual clutter and rewriting tedious annotations as code changes. It's probably not as exciting as research, though.

The whole static / dynamic typing thing is its own flamewar waiting to happen, so I'm going to leave it at that.

loup-vaillant4• 16 years ago

A web site with no bug (I mean, no error) is a web site with no vulnerabilities. Wouldn't that be interesting when your customers trust you with their credit card number?

mahmud2• 16 years ago

There is a really nice prototype language by Gunther Blaschek also called Omega, and it predates this by at least 15 years.

It was Self with mathematical rigor and some MOP elements, IIRC.

silentbicycle2• 16 years ago

Yes, Blaschek has a book on it, _Object-Oriented Programming with Prototypes_.

jfager• 16 years ago

It seems somewhat obvious that sooner than later all code will be written in this (or a similar) way.

LtU is just outright adorable sometimes.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

Such cheerful optimism in an early Saturday morning brightens my whole weekend.

derefr3• 16 years ago

It makes sense when you parse "sooner or later" in the way people use it outside the technological domain:

- Sooner or later we'll go back to the moon.

- Sooner or later we'll understand how the brain works.

- Sooner or later the earth will crumble to dust.

...and so on.

But seriously, we've only been programming for 50 years now. There's still plenty of time for some revolutions and paradigm-shifting—just because the Mythical Man-Month has been heart-rendingly applicable for the last 50 years, doesn't mean that things can't change.

For example:

1. If everyone agrees to target some highish-level bytecode or another, every language will basically have access to every other language's libraries (let's hope it doesn't end up being the JVM, though things seem to be heading there.)

2. If we stick content hashes in function and class names, there will no longer be such a thing as API versioning conflicts, because you'll always know what you're calling—and you can just import random code from remote sites (i.e. invoking on a URL as an identifier = loading whatever bytecode is available at that URL), because you'll just hash it and guarantee that it matches its name before jumping to it.

3. If we can stop requiring that the source code we write be exactly the same source code the compiler parses, we can treat code files as a serialization format for an AST data structure (in XML or SEXPs if you want to keep the source-source human-readable), and work with it however we like in an IDE, even "rendering" it as one old-style-"language" or another.

And so on. These are problems that just need to overcome 20 or 30 years of inertia, and, ever-so-slowly, we're doing it.

DeusExMachina• 16 years ago

As I read around, the JVM seems to be the state of the art for language runtimes. Can you elaborate why you hope it will not be the unified one in the future? Just curious.

viraptor• 16 years ago

So true. Not so long ago, we thought that using natural-language-like text can enable non-programmers to work with code... (and then did it again with rules engines (and we'll do it again at some point in the future)).

Re. 2: didn't we go through this when SOA and SOAP were all the best thing since sliced bread? The problem with APIs is not with versioning per se (if want to use URIs, just stick version number in the first position, webservices do that) - it's about what happens to dependencies. You have to call v5, you've got v1..v8 available, but another library you use talks to v3. Can you share objects? How is the v8-compatible state affected when v5 and v3 are doing the work? Which api is called when in your v5 area you call a method on a v3 object?

Re. 3: Yeah... I was considering tackling that for my degree at some point. The source file is just a placeholder that can contain some string generating new placeholders - why don't we simply start working on it that way?

pwpwp3• 16 years ago

Obviously, that remark is a bit tongue-in-cheek... that said, Omega should be accessible to anyone who's motivated, and able to get through college mathematics. And in some cases, the benefits seem clear and very worthwhile.

rbanffy2• 16 years ago

On the problem of using "omega" a its name, I recall a discussion I had, a long time ago, about Zope.

Zope is an application server. In a given point in its history, Zope Corp, then Digital Creations, decided to "do it right" and fix each and every design wart from version 2 on version 3. The end result is that Zope 3 is more or less incompatible with Zope 2, specially with the kind of app we were developing with it in 2001 (IIRC).

A friend of mine joked Zope 3 should no longer be called "Zope", but, since "Z" is the last letter of the alphabet, the only reasonable choice would be "Yope" and that would suggest a step backwards instead of the jump forward it was.

With that in mind, I never built a product whose name started with Z.

ebiester• 16 years ago

AAope?

mahmud2• 16 years ago

Aaope you're kidding.

baguasquirrel• 16 years ago

The post is a bit of fluff, but the paper is better. Haskell already has GADTs, as the paper points out. Those of you crying out for examples, just read the paper. The real gem are these extensible kinds, which I haven't seen mentioned in Haskell before.

I don't mean to keep throwing water on the fire but the research community already made trees that can't be unbalanced because they wouldn't typecheck, by encoding the depth of the tree into its type. Okasaki demonstrated the concept in Haskell, I believe. Getting it to work for RB-trees sounds new though.

thesz2• 16 years ago

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/she - "The Strathclyde Haskell Enhancement is a somewhat inglorious bodge, equipping ghc with automatic lifting of types to kinds, pattern synonyms, and some kit for higgledy-piggledy literate programming."

From one of the authors of Epigram: http://e-pig.org

I heard they intend to include functionality of SHE into GHC.

kingkilr• 16 years ago

> programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

GeoffWozniak• 16 years ago

It seems nice, but it's more of the same: programming by specification.

There's a place for that, but the future of programming languages, in my mind, lies in changing the metaphor of the process from specification to experimentation. After all, the problem with the specification metaphor is figuring out what the specification actually _is_. To me, the best route to get there is experimentation.

Make programming more about experimentation and I think we'll get somewhere.

(I'm still going to read more about Omega. It looks interesting enough.)

Omega - Language of the Future

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