The Snow Programming Language

http://snow.meta.io/

by bkudria • 17 years ago

18 13 17 years ago

snow.meta.io

Snow _could_ be great. Its delivery as a completely unfinished project, though, gives it an air of non-seriousness.

Compare, for instance, with the first public release of Clojure, which was very usable for everyday programming, and came along with detailed explanations on the rational and motivations behind the creation of the new language.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Only runs on x86-64 architectures and operating systems.

Only runs on POSIX-compliant operating systems.

Snow currently requires the experimental GCC version 4.4

Snow also could have benefited from being prototyped in Awk and Sed first. How can you be influenced by "Smalltalk, Python, Ruby and JavaScript", and still end up writing your compiler in C++?

Good luck to the author, if this is a first attempt (but compiler writing != language design.)

jcw• 17 years ago

What exactly is interesting about this language? The two strongest qualities I see (easy binding with dlopen and parallelization) are unimplemented, and already exist in similar languages.

Virax• 17 years ago

I can't buy into a language that uses colon for assignment.

cschep• 17 years ago

+1, I had a really hard time reading through even the simple examples!

bkudria• 17 years ago

I thought it was kinda interesting. Do any other languages do this?

klipt• 17 years ago

Maxima does:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29

rdtsc• 17 years ago

I like it.

Using '=' for assignment makes less sense than using <- or := or : because traditionally (i.e. mathematically) '=' work like a declaration or a constraint. Then there is the confusion between = and == that has always resulted in countless bugs.

Of course, assignment is a very common operation and I would rather use 1 char (:) for it rather than two (<-, :=).

die_sekte• 17 years ago

No Snow Crash joke yet? I'm disappointed.

And besides, I'm not sure what this is good for.

gaius• 17 years ago

You instantiate an object and then poke methods into it? Ever heard of umm, classes?

blasdel• 17 years ago

Classism is the cancer that is killing OOP

almost• 17 years ago

Prototype-based OOP is an alternative to class-based OOP. See the Self, Javascript and IO languages for examples.

I'm not making any claims as to which is "better", just pointing out that it's a valid way of doing things.

judofyr• 17 years ago

First of all I should say that it's unfortunate that this is spreading while it's still very much in alpha. But hey, they did put the website there and this is the internett. I also feel that I should clarify some parts since it's not completely up to date:

It's prototype-based at core, but will have a class system built upon the prototype-infrastructure.

The C++ version supports 32bit now, but more interesting, they're rewritig it in pure C. See the mailing list for more details (snow-dev at Google Groups).

And just to make it crystal clear: This isn't a release. They just wanted to create a site to give some information on the project, and some guys decided to post this to Reddit/HN. It's still far away from 0.1.

The Snow Programming Language

Related Stories