The Wa Programming Language

by chai2010 • 4 years ago

52 41 4 years ago

chai20103• 4 years ago

Wa is a general-purpose programming language designed for developing robustness and maintainability WebAssembly software. Instead of requiring complex toolchains to set up, you can simply go install it - or run it in a browser.

- Home: https://wa-lang.org - Github: https://github.com/wa-lang/wa - Playground: https://wa-lang.org/playground/

DriftRegion• 4 years ago

from https://wa-lang.org/

自主可控、纯中文国内社区
Independent and controllable, pure Chinese domestic community

Doing software projects for domestic and foreign users is extra work, and the community seems to fragment along language lines. For example: https://www.esp32.com/index.php

I guess a 纯中文国内社区 is one way to solve this, but then why post on hacker news? This seems contradictory.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

Had to deepl "自主可控、纯中文国内社区" to understand that your comment meant it translated to "pure Chinese domestic community", which implies if we are not part of the gang, we can't enjoy the project.

Well, we've been doing this implicitly with English for a long time, so I guess Karma is a bitch.

On the other hand, I wrote a French technical blog for years, and it was way harder to reach a lot of people, so if I had to do it again, it would be in English.

They don't have this problem, since 1B people are Chinese.

tgv• 4 years ago

Well, we've been doing this implicitly with English for a long time, so I guess Karma is a bitch.

Or it's their loss. 7B people don't speak a word of Mandarin, and even more can't read and write it.

anononaut• 4 years ago

This doesn't seem like an appropriate conclusion. There's a massive semantic difference between "China #1" and "Sorry, I only know English." Karma doesn't come into play here.

asplake• 4 years ago

That there’s apparently an unmet need or an unscratched itch might be newsworthy enough. If it’s a strategic move, them more so, surely?

anfelor• 4 years ago

No matter its technical merits, I would never use a programming language where I don't know the dominant (natural) language of the community.

Every project has bugs and discussions how to work around them. This project has 12 Github issues. How severe are they? Will I hit them? I don't know because they are written in Chinese. (But this is not unique to Chinese, I feel the same way about French projects on OCaml and Coq).

endergen• 4 years ago

Most people in the world pretty much have to, due to the prevalence of English in CS based businesses, projects, and academia.

lynguist• 4 years ago

Seems unlikely.

An estimated 2 billion people understand English globally. That number is only growing.

While Excel has probably the most programmers in the world, their instructions are localized.

And among programmers of other programming languages I bet that way over 50% understand English. So I’d say that most programmers do understand English.

youguyssuck• 4 years ago

Are you aware of Ruby?

selectnull• 4 years ago

The Ruby creator is Japanese but if you want to start using it today, you don't even have to know who Matz is. The website with the documentation is in English and translated to quite a number of other languages.

It really is not the fair comparison and I get what the parent was refering to.

chai20103• 4 years ago

I agree with you: since my English is not good either, I am also reducing the dependence on English in my programming work.

For the Wa language, I hope to have a lightweight WASM Native language: no GC, no Goroutine. Also, I hope functions with "Chinese" names can be exported, which is forbidden in Go.

3dgen3• 4 years ago

That's exactly why we created this project.

Over 7million programmers in China have to learn English first before they can study how to program, for most of them, "下标不可超过数组长度" is much more easier to understand than "the index of a array should not exceed it's length".

samatman• 4 years ago

Apropos of approximately nothing, I had a hunch what this was about and was completely wrong!

The Hanzi had me going for about five seconds; they don't mean 和.

Anyway, if anyone does write a programming language with keywords and text in Kanji, let us know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(Japanese_culture)

vanderZwan2• 4 years ago

This new information make Wario a completely different character to me

liftm• 4 years ago

His name is a portmanteau of Mario's name and the Japanese word warui (悪い), meaning "bad".

HKH2• 4 years ago

The Hanzi had me going for about five seconds; they don't mean 和.

You mean Pinyin (拼音), not Hanzi (漢字).

h4n1• 4 years ago

Since Classical Chinese is ancestral to kanji, you might be interested in https://wy-lang.org/

kagevf• 4 years ago

This wikipedia article lists some:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3...

vanderZwan2• 4 years ago

Wonder if this will pick up after Walt seems to have been abandoned in favor of AssemblyScript.

[0] https://github.com/ballercat/walt

[1] https://www.assemblyscript.org/

anentropic• 4 years ago

At first glance it looks a lot like Go, but you can already compile Go to WASM I believe.

In which case I'm curious what are the differences or use case vs just using Go?

alrlroipsp2• 4 years ago

At first glance it looks a lot like Go

But, this is not at all how go looks:

    fn add(a: i32, b: i32) => i32 {
        return a+b
    }

It looks heavily inspired from the syntax used in rust or zig tho. (fn keyword, variable type syntax, return value)

what are the differences or use case vs just using Go?

- go has a different syntax, different keywords, different ecosystem and so on.

- go is a general purpose programming language, while wa is explicit in targeting wasm.

I don't see any special similarities more than they are c-style family languages.

bentheklutz• 4 years ago

There is a six character difference discounting the fact that one calls the type i32 vs Golang's int32; four are punctuation that may or may not be required for ability to parse correctly and 2 are from "fn" -> "func." Each of the common tokens is arranged in the same order relative to one another. If one affords themselves the use of "type i32 int32" in Golang, then it is

    fn add(a: i32, b: i32) => i32 {
        return a + b;
    }

    func add(a i32, b i32) i32 {
        return a + b;
    }

Compare with a syntax like C, C#, or Java where you have tokens in the declaration in almost the reverse order

    i32 add(i32 a, i32 b) {
        return a + b;
    }

The two (Golang and Wa) are certainly distinct, but I would say they are closer than simply both being C-style for this particular case at least.

travisgriggs• 4 years ago

When I saw the headline, I figured this was something out of the University of Washington, and therefore named after my home state of Washington. :)

It obviously is not. What does “wa” mean in Chinese? Or is it really just (w)eb (a)ssembly?

3dgen3• 4 years ago

"wa" is the pronunciation of "凹"

Chinese is a kind of hieroglyph. The shape of "凹" is very similar to the logo of this project, and it looks like the letter "C" rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. So it maybe means a C/Coder that lies down.

sydbarrett74• 4 years ago

So if there were a derivative (child) language, would it be called Ben Wa?

The Wa Programming Language

Related Stories