Streem – a new programming language from Matz

http://github.com/matz/streem

by tree_of_item • 12 years ago

547 176 12 years ago

github.com

glibgil• 12 years ago

Whatever, https://github.com/ekmett/machines https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz-stream

vlunkr• 12 years ago

This is newsworthy because Matz is developing a new language, not because such a thing doesn't already exist.

vessenes2• 12 years ago

Why do most implementations of FizzBuzz special case % 15? I haven't ever really understood this. Maybe it's just my math-y background, but it always seemed to me you should just check mod 3 and mod 5 without an else between them, concatenating Fizz and Buzz.

Can anyone else comment on this? Most canonical FizzBuzz programs special case 15, and I don't get it.

rudolf04• 12 years ago

Easier to understand for beginners, I suppose.

For the record, I have utterly no math background (hardly passed algebra), but I also agree that checking only 3 and 5 is the better solution and is how I've always written FizzBuzz.

donmcc• 12 years ago

It's to neatly handle the line break.

vessenes2• 12 years ago

I suppose it's a style issue as to whether an extra mod is better than checking if one of the triggers has passed. I would propose it's more DRY to do it the short way though.

wenderen• 12 years ago

I do that too. It seems more in the spirit of the problem. For an alternate problem, in which you are asked to print strings a, b and c (!= a concat b) if the number is divisible by 3, 5 and 15 respectively, it makes sense to special case 15.

masukomi2• 12 years ago

just because 15 HAPPENS to be a concatenation of the output of 3 and the output of 5 today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. If I said "say Fizz for multiples of 3, Buzz for multiples of 5, and 'this is a silly coding problem' for multiples of 3 and 5 then you'd have to rewrite your code.

Some of us know that clients ALWAYS change their minds, specs are rarely equivalent to the end result, and code against future changes that are trivial to account for in advance.

Doji• 12 years ago

For any implementation you can manufacture an example which will require a person to re-structure their code.

Additionally, using %15 is not DRY. If the spec changes from saying "Fizz" on multiples of 3 to saying "Fizz" on multiples of 4, then you will have to also update 15->20. If you forget to do this, you have a bug.

The correct implementation is dependent on the problem's context, and such context is not available with the FizzBuzz problem.

Legion• 12 years ago

This is absolutely true for real-world coding. However, for the purposes of an exercise, I think the fact that 15 was chosen was not an accident, but is part of the exercise. Does the coder recognize the relationship between the multiples, and recognize the ability to optimize by removing an extraneous comparison?

It's kind of a trivial test for that sort of recognition, but anything as small as FizzBuzz is going to be rather trivial.

dragonwriter5• 12 years ago

Well, its more direct in that, while it increases the number of branches, it minimizes the number of statements executed on any branch. It's also the solution that maps most directly to the problem statement, and, absent a strong technical reason to do otherwise, a direct mapping from requirements to code is a good thing.

icedog2• 12 years ago

I disagree that it maps most directly to the problem statement. You're performing a common factor computation in your mind, which may be more difficult given numbers other than 3 and 5. In my opinion, pattern matching offers the most direct solution and comes with an abundance of compiler optimizations. Here's an example in Rust...

        for i in range(1i, 101) {  
            match (i % 3, i % 5) {  
                (0, 0) => println!("Fizzbuzz"),  
                (0, _) => println!("Fizz"),  
                (_, 0) => println!("Buzz"),  
                _ => println!("{}", i),  
            }  
        }

FnuGk• 12 years ago

Another thing i dont understand is why people hardcode 15. I would rather write (3 * 5) and let the compiler figure out that 3 * 5=15. This way i think it more clearly states where the number 15 comes from. Any reason to write 15 over (3 * 5)?

lfender64452• 12 years ago

interesting point, but I feel the same could be said for (3 * 5)

rzwitserloot• 12 years ago

Because of the requirement to print the number if it is divisible by neither. Here:

    if x isDivisibleBy 3: print "Fizz"
    if x isDivisibleBy 5: print "Buzz"

and.. how do I now print x in the neither case? I can't 'else'. I could make a long if not divisible by either if expression, but that's less easy to read than an if/else chain that starts out with 'if divisible by both, print fizzbuzz'.

If fizzbuzz was: Print FizzBuzz for multiples of 15, fizz for multiples of 3, and buzz for multiples of 5, and nothing otherwise, I bet you'd see the above pseudocode far more.

apoorvai• 12 years ago

I'm not really a programming language expert, but it seems to me that having an implementation being the spec wouldn't be a good idea. If the Streem implementation has a bug, then the bug becomes the authoritative behavior. Any platform specific quirks would also make it difficult to have defined behavior.

ianlevesque• 12 years ago

Yep, welcome to Ruby!

To be fair, a spec with tests was reversed out of the ruby implementation[1], so things have improved a bit.

1. http://rubyspec.org/

jfoutz• 12 years ago

There's an old argument about worse is better. The gist is, doing things the right way is hard and takes a long time. sometimes, it's better to just get something simple out there and deal with the problems later.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

skrebbel2• 12 years ago

Sure, but this is not finished at all. Starting with the spec instead of a prototype implementation sounds like a very very limiting and unrewarding design process.

aidenn0• 12 years ago

Implementations are nearly always the spec when a language is young. You want to be able to experiment and make changes. Then as it matures, you typically get a spec.

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

It looks like a weekends worth of work for Matz, I doubt he's even thinking of a spec at this point.

dragonwriter5• 12 years ago

Right now, the closest thing to a spec is the sample FizzBuzz code (as an implicit spec that "this code will solve FizzBuzz"); there is no implementation (just work-in-progress parser/lexer code.)

So, while I'll agree that there are issues that come from the implementation being the spec of a language in general, I would say we are well earlier than the point at which we can identify that as a problem with Streem.

xrstf• 12 years ago

Welcome to PHP. The Zend Engine 2 is basically the spec, even though Facebook has recently (couple of weeks ago) started writing a spec to make sure their HHVM is compatible.

weeksie• 12 years ago

At the very least, it's going to be amazing to watch a master language designer build a new language from the ground up.

That said, I'm incredibly optimistic about a new Matz language. If I was going to guess, the syntax will be much lighter and the semantics will make VM optimization much easier than in Ruby.

alphonse23• 12 years ago

dude, the man publishes 3 files, claims he's going to make a new programming language, and it hits the front page of hackernews -- Matz has some power there.

chrisduesing• 12 years ago

It's not power, it's credibility. If someone who has never done anything says they are going to accomplish something large people are skeptical. If someone who already created a successful and highly adopted programming language says they are making a new one people are rightly intrigued.

skrebbel2• 12 years ago

Reminds me a lot of Elixir's |> operator, which does the exact same thing. Nice! Curious how it'll turn out to compare with Elixir on other areas.

mjt0229• 12 years ago

I've never heard of Elixir, but I always assumed that the |> originated in F#. Ocaml has it pretty much standard, too, although you can define it in one line in Ocaml:

let (|>) x f = f x

reirob• 12 years ago

Also in Haskell [0]:

    (|>) :: Seq a -> a -> Seq a
    O(1). Add an element to the right end of a sequence. Mnemonic: a triangle with the single element at the pointy end.

It seems to be in the containers package since 2005: [1]

[0] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.5.5.1/docs/D...

[1] https://github.com/haskell/containers/commit/1e61853dbd4b9fc...

muraiki2• 12 years ago

In Elixir, |> does not flip arguments. It lets you chain together multiple functions by inserting the result of the previous function as the first argument of the following function. Here's an example from http://www.theerlangelist.com/2014/01/why-elixir.html

The following code computes the sum of squares of all positive numbers of a list:

list |> Enum.filter(&(&1 > 0)) |> Enum.map(&(&1 * &1)) |> Enum.reduce(0, &(&1 + &2))

angersock• 12 years ago

Could be cool, but Elxiir has the EVM under it, and that is some quality engineering. Ruby is good but kind of clownshoes.

dragonwriter5• 12 years ago

Streem is inspired by Erlang and Ruby, and currently the only code is initial code for the parser and lexer, and there's no information about what the runtime will be like.

dwash• 12 years ago

michaelmior2• 12 years ago

Why? I think it's pretty normal to drop this in as boilerplate on new projects.

callahad• 12 years ago

Note the year ;)

ukd1• 12 years ago

wrong year

breischl• 12 years ago

Presumably because it's not 2015 yet, at least according to my calendar...

cpach• 12 years ago

It’s from the future!

bronson• 12 years ago

Only three weeks early.

NARKOZ• 12 years ago

the software is related to the magazine article of 2015 issue of the (Japanese) programming magazine

https://github.com/matz/streem/commit/1c8189f9e1df3289801b28...

ksherlock• 12 years ago

    true{TRAIL}	return keyword_false;

Well, this will be fun to debug

falcor84• 12 years ago

This is indeed one of the nicest typos I've seen, but note that there's already a pull request. I suppose bugs can become shallow when your 3 file repo reaches the first page of hn. https://github.com/matz/streem/pull/4/files

retr0h2• 12 years ago

Not a fan of the closing braces.

vortico• 12 years ago

But the opening brace `{` is fine?

retr0h2• 12 years ago

Meaning I would rather not have opening or closing.

k__• 12 years ago

Didn't Matz mention that he wasn't either, when explaining Rubys syntax?

I'm a fan of indentation based blocks, so this seems like a step back for me :\

randyrand2• 12 years ago

What does it matter?

100982• 12 years ago

I see this as a very good alternative to traditional shell scripting languages.

Dirlewanger• 12 years ago

Anything that beats Bash's ugliness I'm all for.

100982• 12 years ago

it would also be nice if it had a static type system, but given that it's Matz, it's unlikely...

luckydude• 12 years ago

We did a similar thing to the awk source. Made awk scripts first class, you could pipe them to each other.

bnegreve• 12 years ago

It's definitely a good idea. Pipes are both very powerful and very simple to use and debug, yet they are not very common in general purpose programming languages (examples?). I'm not surprised that someone is trying to build a language around them. I'll follow that, but for now it's a bit too early to judge.

eggie• 12 years ago

See node.js streams.

c3RlcGhlbnI_3• 12 years ago

I am glad that someone is working on a new stream processing language, it is a very interesting paradigm. However I hope that they provide some very robust tools for controlling input splitting. As I have spent too much time fighting with awk and wishing it was more flexible(it is frustrating always having exactly two levels of splitting with only matchers on the first and only inverse splitting on the second).

As is you would have to put in filters to resplit input into lines and that is very messy for something that you will need/want to do very often.

For example if you wanted to parse by character it would be wonderful to be able to do the following:

  STDIN | /./{|c|
    # stuff
  }

Even better would be if you took it a step further and offered something like regex pattern matching for the block input. e.g.

  STDIN | /\w+/{|word|
    /house/ {
      # when word is house
    }
    /car/ {
      # when word is car
    }
    {
      # default case
    }
  }

nateabele• 12 years ago

However I hope that they provide some very robust tools for controlling input splitting

Yes, splitting and combining. Looking at the code example, I feel like so much opportunity is just being squandered, where something like Rust's mapping constructs would feel so much better. Yours is definitely more in that vein, here's something a little closer:

  STDIN | /\w+/{|word|
    /house/   => "foo"
    /car/     => "bar"
    "literal" => "baz"
    _         => "dib"
    # (where _ is a magical symbol for the default case... could be anything)
  }

rudolf04• 12 years ago

Streaming, pattern matching, and regex combined in one sounds pretty damn cool.

Might also be nice to borrow some of Scala's features for terser code than Ruby, like

    ary | { _ + 5 }

instead of

    ary | { |el| el + 5 }

breuleux5• 12 years ago

Personally I would go for something more like this:

    STDIN | /\w+/ | {|each match|
      /house/   => "foo"
      /car/     => "bar"
      "literal" => "baz"
      _         => "dib"
    }

Where "each x" in a parameter list wraps the body in a map and uses x as the loop variable, and "match" in a parameter list instructs that this is the parameter we are doing pattern matching on in the body (no need to name it).

I think this is a more flexible solution, and more modifiers than each could be introduced. For instance, sum of squares could be:

    seq(100) | {|each x| x * x} | {|reduce (x = 0, y)| x + y}

ori_b• 12 years ago

Sounds like a job for structural regex: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf

dwenzek• 12 years ago

Yes, this paper is interesting.

It shows well how a slight shift on the problem expression can lead to a more powerful, simpler to use and general solution. In this case, the shift is to design stream processors (like `sed` and `awk`) to work on streams of text chunks defined by regular expressions rather on streams of lines matching regular expressions.

Regarding this concern, it's hard to say what is the plan of Matz for Streem with a single code example. But the fact, that this sample code processes a stream of integers, lets hope a tool with more flexibility than `sed` or `awk` to specify what is processed along the streams.

mackwic4• 12 years ago

Awesome ! Let's call it sed !

Reference: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#Examples

Sorry, I couldn't miss that one. :) Really, check the example. Sed is most powerful tool and can do astonishing work.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

Everything you can do in sed you can do in perl, there's been sed-to-perl converters shipped with perl since the ur-times.

c3RlcGhlbnI_3• 12 years ago

That manual is possibly the single most useful technical document that I have ever read. It has enabled me to write extremely powerful programs that no one I know can understand.

It would however be nice to have a tool with similar power but simpler, more comprehensible syntax. One of the other commenters linked to an interesting document on sam, which has a better control flow but equally arcane syntax.

mamcx• 12 years ago

" new stream processing language"... which are the olds?

I'm playing with the idea of build a language, where the functions are unix-like, with STDIN, OUT & ERR. So, instead of raise a exception, it put data in ERR... and make it easy to compose them.

c3RlcGhlbnI_3• 12 years ago

There don't seem to be that many that work on text streams, which is what I was referring to. The ones I am aware of are awk, shell scripting languages(bash, zsh, ksh, etc.), and the ed like DSLs( sed, ed, sam, etc.). I think there are others that are not as widely used.

If you google stream processing language you will also get a whole bunch that are not text specific. They are definitely worth looking at if you are interested in building any kind of stream based language.

bglazer• 12 years ago

I'd like to recommend a python command line utility called pyp. It allows you to do python string manipulation on text streams using the standard pipe operator.

https://code.google.com/p/pyp/

vram22• 12 years ago

Yes, pyp is interesting. So are some other roughly similar Python tools for doing pipe-like stuff. I had blogged about some of them here, a while ago, including pyp, osh, and pipe (not the Unix pipe system call, but a Python module):

Some ways of doing UNIX-style pipes in Python:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2011/09/some-ways-of-doing-unix-st...

And that later inspired me to create an experimental tool called pipe_controller:

Swapping pipe components at runtime with pipe_controller:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/10/swapping-pipe-components-a...

The above post links (recursively) to a few others, also by me, describing a couple of other ways of using pipe_controller, including this one:

Using PipeController to run a pipe incrementally:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/using-pipecontroller-to-ru...

and also includes the link for it on my Bitbucket account.

There's also plumbum, another such Python module.

pablovidal85• 12 years ago

This inspired me to build a similar tool which runs javascript instead.

https://github.com/aynik/sx

jkgeyti• 12 years ago

I found it cumbersome to do branching in most of the existing python stream tools. I made an alternative, that allows you to use curly brackets for indentation:

https://github.com/ircflagship2/pype

klibertp• 12 years ago

Take a look at TXR: http://www.nongnu.org/txr/

The link was posted on HN some time ago and was generally well received. I didn't have the time to use it much yet, but it looks very nice. Well, unless you hate lisp.

bjourne• 12 years ago

This is how you would write it in factor:

    "~/yourfile.txt" utf8 file-contents 
    "\\w+" findall [ first second ] map [ 
        { 
            { "house" [ "house stuff" print ] } 
            { "car" [ "car" print ] } 
            [ "default stuff: %u\n" printf ] 
        } case 
    ] each

Tacit programming basically is the same thing as stream programming.

marianov• 12 years ago

AWK http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK

chmartin• 12 years ago

Awesome I hacked something like this together a couple years ago using ruby and gnu parallel

https://github.com/charlesmartin14/gnu_parallel

it is badly needed

pluma• 12 years ago

*Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby

I'm not sure everyone is familiar enough with Ruby to know who Matz is.

chc• 12 years ago

If they don't know who Matz is, are they likely to know who Yukihiro Matsumoto is?

EDIT: Interesting fact: I believe this is now my most downvoted comment in five years on HN, at effectively -7. Never would have guessed. I'm not exactly sure what it says, but I thought it was an interesting data point.

louthy2• 12 years ago

No, but the sentence as a whole does explain who he is:

"Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby"

sandstrom• 12 years ago

Probably not, but the epithet `creator of Ruby` gives more context.

kaeluka• 12 years ago

I, for one, remember the full name but not "Matz"

lfender64452• 12 years ago

I agree with you chc. I've been using ruby for 3 years and would not have been able to retrieve first name from memory!

Argorak3• 12 years ago

If you ever meet Matz, talk to him about programming languages. While he gets some flak for all the problems of his original hobby project (Ruby), he obviously loves programming languages and gives things more thought then people give him credit for. I had the chance to talk to him while I was still a student and full of ideas how the language could be made "better" and he shot them all down. For good reasons, as I know nowadays. So I always love seeing him building languages.

I shared a small story about him and languages quite a while ago, I guess it fits here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562979

danso• 12 years ago

Does he really get a "lot of flak" for Ruby? While I know not everyone loves Ruby, it seems crazy to me that people would denigrate Matz on a personal level...to me (admittedly, a novice in designing languages), Ruby always seemed well-thought out...that is, the trade-offs do not seem out of line given the philosophical benefits, and not everyone can make claim to turning a personal project into a worldwide language.

Also, he seems like a nice guy, not the type to be drawn into the kind of flareups in which he would draw flak.

gaius2• 12 years ago

I don't think so many people have a problem with Ruby the language so much as the culture around Rails.

Argorak3• 12 years ago

See the amount of people complaining about the missing spec for Ruby in this thread, which is his doing. At some point ~50% of the comments here were downvoted.

I should clarify that I meant Ruby the implementation, not Ruby the language.

Edit: I changed the word to "some", maybe that was a bit of a hyperbole. I see quite some unreflected bashing though.

vidarh• 12 years ago

As someone who loves Ruby dearly, there are a number of severe flaws that are hampering Ruby now.

The thing is they are hampering Ruby now because people want to use Ruby for all kinds of things he probably never intended it for.

E.g. I'm on a crazy multi-year journey towards doing an ahead of time compiler for Ruby. Ruby is not designed for that. It has dozens of issues that makes it incredibly hard to do that efficiently compared to many other languages.

At the same time, MRI was incredibly inefficient in earlier incarnations because it was simple. It interpreted the syntax tree. Easy implement. A nightmare to make fast.

Ruby's grammar is also a massive pain for people who want to implement Ruby. Great for developers mostly until you run into some of the hairy corner cases that are often a result of trying to be incredibly clever to make things flow very naturally when writing Ruby most of the time, which has led to a lot of byzantine rules.

I wouldn't give Matz flak over it, simply because some of it are part of what makes Ruby so pleasant to use, and others are simply artefacts of him meeting his needs while implementing Ruby rather than designing it to meet some ideal that wasn't necessarily very relevant to him then.

But I'm not surprised (a bit sad, but not surprised) if someone makes it personal.

weavie• 12 years ago

Anyone who does anything significant will inevitable get flak from somewhere.

emmanueloga_2• 12 years ago

I'd be careful with people shutting down my ideas up front, in casual conversation.

Sure, you may end up discarding your ideas yourself, but if you instead sought to implement them you could learn something in the way, maybe turn them into something that would actually make sense. That would not happen if you just followed advice from some authority and simply decided not to experiment with your ideas any further. So I'd not discard advice from knowledgeable people, but I would not take it as a final word either.

golemotron• 12 years ago

Great idea, but I'm a bit disappointed in the syntax. Composed chains in Ruby are much nicer to look at.

patrick73• 12 years ago

Sorry, but if you know nothing about Ruby this is pure hype.

samuell• 12 years ago

Would be cool if it would incorporate some thinking and concepts from Flow-based programming [1], as that is AFAIK the most comprehensive architecture covering all the aspects of asyncronous concurrent processing that one might run into (multiple in/out-ports, channels with bounded buffers, sub-stream support, etc etc).

[1] http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming

kricstta31• 12 years ago

-> in clojure or hy deals with that nicely:

(-> (read) (eval) (print) (loop))

using python-sh in hy this is possible:

(-> (cat "/usr/share/dict/words") (grep "-E" "^hy") (wc "-l"))

randyrand2• 12 years ago

Why is Stream spelled incorrectly?

faitswulff• 12 years ago

Easier to search for, at least.

grandalf• 12 years ago

Stream processing languages typically derive from SQL (streamSQL) or prolog (Rapide) ... This one doesn't seem anywhere near as powerful but who knows.

NanoWar• 12 years ago

Now it might be time to have a look into YACC, LEX and maybe BISON and follow Matz' repo :)

vlucas• 12 years ago

Interesting that he chose a C-like syntax after going the complete opposite direction with Ruby.

coldtea• 12 years ago

Huh? Ruby also has a C-like (algol derived) syntax.

The replacement of "}" with "end" etc, is a trivial replacement, not a different type of syntax.

Lisp, Prolog, etc, would be a non-C syntax.

stormbrew• 12 years ago

Obviously you can flatten this inheritance tree any way you like, but while all C-likes are obviously algol-likes I do think it's useful to consider C-like a distinct branch within that.

That said I think you probably want more than just curly braces to define C-like even then.

mijoharas3• 12 years ago

Can someone help explain what's going on here: \"([^\\\"]|\\.)\" [seen here in context](https://github.com/matz/streem/blob/master/src/lex.l#L49).

Now it seems to be finding literal strings (so "strings" e.t.c.). That would explain the literal double quotes on either side. so without that we get: ([^\\\"]|\\.) so zero or more repeating versions of [^\\\"]|\\.

What I don't understand is why there is the explicit or \\. construct there, as this seems unnecessary. Am I missing something? also, why does it seem that strings cannot have either literal \ or literal " in them?

zb• 12 years ago

Because if there's a \ you want to skip over the next character, even if it's a ", but if it's not escaped then you want " to be the end of the string.

mijoharas3• 12 years ago

You're completely right, I think I had read it as \. rather than \\. and thus didn't understand it. Thanks for helping me get it straight in my head.

faragon• 12 years ago

"Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matthew 26:52, King James Version)

Sony played hard many times, e.g. closing Linux on Playstation 3 devices. I do not condone the attack, although I have no sympathy at all for such kind of companies.

mostafah• 12 years ago

And... here’s an implementation: https://github.com/mattn/streeem

Well, that was quick.

rurounijones• 12 years ago

Heh, got to love the repo message "Sorry, Sorry"

panic• 12 years ago

Tab (https://bitbucket.org/tkatchev/tab) is another interesting recent text processing language.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 12 years ago

Matz, now get started on implementing transducers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mTbuzafcII

eccstartup• 12 years ago

I hope it will support really big integers as in Haskell and better floating point number calculation, although I cannot foresee the power right now. Because it is concurrent, it may be very useful in scientific computing, whether in small or large scale.

hdmoore• 12 years ago

This is an excellent example of using a parser as a language. Whether it has any legs depends on whether it beats existing tools on some front (sed, perl, ruby, etc). The concurrent angle is interesting, but I have found a multi-process approach to stream data to be more efficient than most concurrent single-process implementations. For example, with DAP (https://github.com/rapid7/dap), we found that GNU Parallel + Ruby MRI was more effective than a concurrent language such as Go.

nchuhoai• 12 years ago

For people interested, you can do something like this in Ruby right now that has nearly the same syntax:

http://pragdave.me/blog/2007/12/30/pipelines-using-fibers-in...

lgleason• 12 years ago

I love Ruby and I love Matz. With that being said there are some things that Ruby struggles with. I know that there have been some conversations among the core on bringing in more functional concepts to Ruby....at least since April. To me this says that Matz is coming to the conclusion that we may need a new language to get functional right.

While I am sad to see that Ruby may be superseded by a new language I'm really happy to see Matz leading the way with one of the solutions. In the Ruby community we have a expression "Matz is nice and therefore we are nice". That has set the tone for the community in ways that have never been the same in some of the others.

As someone who has had the opportunity to talk with Matz on multiple occasions and work with the Ruby community it would be great to see this as a natural evolution of Ruby and the people who love it... As I have started to move on to working with more functional languages etc. I have started to move away from doing Ruby, but if the community can continue on and evolve with a new language that would be awesome!

dragonwriter5• 12 years ago

I know that there have been some conversations among the core on bringing in more functional concepts to Ruby....at least since April.

Only since April? Has there been a non-bugfix release of Ruby that didn't bring in more functional concepts to Ruby since, well, ever? AFAICT, bringing more support for ideas that come from the FP world has been one of the perennial drivers of progress in Ruby, not a new issue that emerged this spring.

To me this says that Matz is coming to the conclusion that we may need a new language to get functional right.

I think that's reading a lot into it. Matz experimenting with something doesn't mean that the intent is to replace Ruby with it.

emmanueloga_2• 12 years ago

"Matz is nice and therefore we are nice"

This non sequitur annoys me. Deconstructing it:

* A: "Matz is nice": Let's say we all agree this is true.

* B: "we are nice": i.e., the ruby community is nice.

* P(A -> B): (A therefore B) is a slogan, so I assume the proposition P is believed to be true. Is it?

In order for P to be true, the only option is for B to be true as long as Matz keeps being nice. Assuming Matz is still good-natured, is not hard to find counterexamples for B (every big community have some less-than-nice people). So the facts tell us that P is false.

Alternatively, if you assume that Matz is not nice, then, without mattering if "we" are nice or not, the slogan holds true (modus ponens [1]).

Anyway, my point is that the slogan is as silly as this rant :p.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens#Justification_via_...

MarkSweep• 12 years ago

I don't understand the original quote to be a proposition. I think what it's trying to say is "Matz is nice so we too aspire to be nice". It's not descriptive, it's perscriptive.

psquid• 12 years ago

I think the intent was more along the lines of "Matz is nice and therefore we should be nice", but in making it shorter and snappier it now uses a more ambiguous piece of the English language.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

I like the idea of dataflow or stream processing ideas. I would love if you could make the connector pieces smarter so that you were enforcing a contract between the piping mechanisms. I believe you could build some very interesting systems with that approach.

leke• 12 years ago

What kind of areas could Streem be used in?

zvrba• 12 years ago

Take a look at dss from AT&T AST tools:

http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/dss/dss.html

http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/publications/dss-2004....

pmalynin• 12 years ago

Looking to hire a Streem professional, must have at least 5 years experience with Streem.

enry_straker• 12 years ago

Great. I have been streem-ing for more than 15 years now. :-)

Streem – a new programming language from Matz

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