The Slate Programming Language

http://www.slatelanguage.org

by tzar • 12 years ago

65 44 12 years ago

Unfortunately, this seems to be no longer developed - last github commit is from a year ago. It might've been interesting to see another language with the image system.

I've been playing with Smalltalk recently, and it's really interesting as an environment. It has a number of RAD tools built in - the flexible Morphic GUI from which you can quickly create your interface and middle-click to debug any given morph, the image system allowing you to store state without explicitly dealing with a database, and being able to develop from the same environment that your code runs in, allowing quick turn-around in adding and testing features - and I'm wondering why it's not used more often for line-of-business applications.

ozten• 12 years ago

Slate development goes back many years. Perhaps sometimes you've got to let the field lay fallow for a season, before that next big burst of inspiration.

cmrdporcupine• 12 years ago

Had no idea this project was still active. Used to have some correspondence with an author (Lee Salzman) of the prototype oo multiple dispatch paper many years ago (over 10 now I guess), and had written my own implementation of it for a toy language of my own.

Good to see this still ticking. Though these days I'm more interested in static typed languages, this is still very cool.

doublec• 12 years ago

Self is also an interesting language in the Smalltalk tradition. I did a short screencast of the GUI here http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2014/12/17/changing-attributes-in-s...

There are others in the 'self' tag of the blog. A modern look at this type of environment, which Slate seems to be progress towards, would be interesting.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

I actually had a big vision to merge Morphic into the CLIM/DUIM tradition from Lisp and Dylan. I was very inspired by Lisp Machines, and still own one to run an emulation for for demonstrations.

Morphic alone was not good enough to build the future out of. First-class information objects called presentations from the CLIM history would have complemented it nicely.

marktangotango• 12 years ago

>not good enough to build the future out of

I think i hear this idea from the smalltalk community (or former community members) than anywhere else. The sense that there is supposed to be something out there thats an order of magnitude better than what we have today. Where does that come from? Whats so great about "the future" ie what promise does it hold?

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

Morphic alone was not good enough to build the future out of. First-class information objects called presentations from the CLIM history would have complemented it nicely.

Agreed, but the solution sounds like the whole naked object fad from a decade ago.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

I don't feel motivated to work on it (this particular artifact) any more. I want to make something relevant to and appreciated by an audience, and programmer culture seems to be unwilling to do that in a deep way.

If I continue, it will be with a specific story in mind about who it's for and what message to convey. I have been attending The Strange Loop for a few years now and growing some ideas to write about.

It's worth noting that Slate was one major project in a long stream of development I started privately in the early 1990's and then brainstormed with some nerds on at the TUNES project until I made Slate its own thing (a kind of stepping stone towards the TUNES goals).

mamcx• 12 years ago

For fun, I want to build a language. After see you can do a lisp very easy, I stop and wonder for what my "new" language can be useful. This make me think in how do a REPL, a debugger, what kind of task this must solve naturally, etc, and for which kind of users!

However, pull of a successfully language is very hard. That depress me.

--- See more at

https://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/2ocw2r/how_to_creat...

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

I want to make something relevant to and appreciated by an audience, and programmer culture seems to be unwilling to do that in a deep way.

Being a language designer is rough like this.

SamReidHughes• 12 years ago

It's a relief to find out this language is dynamically typed. That way I don't have to think about it.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

So, there's something about that that is true, but we weren't aiming for this per se.

We wanted to make the idea of a programming world as an OS manifest, so Slate images and object networks are like a file system image. The most straightforward way for us to get into that was dynamic with optional typing.

The idea at some point was to have staged meta-programming (like we did to build the VM out of Slate) that was typed, so that the static existed within the dynamic but in a more obvious way than "sure, my Haskell universe exists on a nasty filesystem".

We tried.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

I guess I should say that we built a type system in Slate using objects and multimethods; it was used for metaprogramming and self-hosting.

Obviously not ideal, but we leaned in the direction we hoped others would see. I don't think enough people saw what we were doing beyond the front page news blurbs. Slate has a lot of good code in it.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

Ohai. I'm one of the authors. Thanks for noticing this, but we did wind down the project several years ago after failing to bootstrap it into what we wanted it to be.

Main regrets: - Starting with multiple delegation from Self; we migrated to Traits a la Squeak and Perl6 but it was pretty late in the project. - Hewing too closely to Smalltalk syntax, instead of ditching the lexical awkwardness for keyword syntax and more conventional but unambiguous lexical patterns. - Image-based bootstrapping was useful, but too monolithic. I wanted to make it have a symbolic graph linker to stitch together images from modules. That would have kept the project flexible enough to keep going.

As it is, I'm disillusioned with the open source and software research fields, and working on startups to accumulate my own funds to run a project like this without being subject to the rhetorical whims of a diseased culture. Hah!

You may as well AMA.

mattgreenrocks• 12 years ago

How long have you been playing with developing languages? How much do you think syntax matters? Will a homoiconic language ever capture the mainstream?

Actually, what hope is there in capturing the imagination of the mainstream? Seems like they're so used to having languages forced down their throat by corporate entities that our brightest hope lies in children.

Blackthorn• 12 years ago

Will a homoiconic language ever capture the mainstream?

Not the author (obviously) but I think it already has -- Clojure has gone mainstream.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

I was perverted by AutoLISP and CADForth in the very early 90's. By 1995 I was in college and researching on my own, found Self and Squeak and made a rather stupid but fun little lisp that ran on DOS4GW and built a Motif-style Morphic-like UI out of it.

And then I threw it away as a learning exercise. It was a few years of skills building before I really tried to make a language project. Slate had a few incarnations which were quite different from what it currently presents as.

smosher_2• 12 years ago

Image-based bootstrapping was useful, but too monolithic.

I feel that. I have no problem with images in theory, but history has made me flinch at them.

As it is, I'm disillusioned with the open source and software research fields

That's a shame. Open source is very diverse... I hope you have better experiences in the future.

You may as well AMA.

Awesome. What do you think of Io? — http://iolanguage.org/

I'm asking because I rarely ever hear PL people talk about Io.

I'm also curious, was there a coherent design goal or philosophy behind Slate? Alan Kay is very clear about his values, I have a handle on what Io is about, and so on. All I'm getting from Slate is "better than Smalltalk" but is there something more specific to it?

briantrice21• 12 years ago

I know Steve Dekorte and remember him bringing me along to visit David Ungar over beer and pizza more than a decade ago. :) Io doesn't quite address the goals I wanted, and it was dynamic in ways that prevented some optimizations. But it is rather charming.

Slate had some design goals, but a lot of the goal was general, like "how much can we fit into Smalltalk and still have that core idea be recognizable and coherent?" Multimethods, prototypes, macros, optionals, etc. were all just a part of that.

We did spend a lot of the project's focus on how heavily we could leverage multimethods to clarify and collapse code. Slate probably uses multimethods better than any language I know of, although I admire what Julia does with it within the Matlab/R compatibility constraints.

Mainly, we wanted to take operating systems and meld them with computer languages. The TUNES project says a lot of what I think about that (with a good deal of ideological distortion and handwaving, but that's group editing for you).

Honestly, I checked Alan Kay's philosophical reading list, and its depth in phenomenology and developmental psychology was stuff I covered in college. While he belongs to another generation, I'm keenly following the ideas of the FoNC project and hope to deliver something that takes that to an everyday context broadly.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

Images are like filesystems or sandboxes, by the way. They just need better tool support.

abecedarius2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean about the lexical awkwardness -- that it's unfamiliar or that it's not so good on its own terms? (Smalltalk's syntax always rubbed me the wrong way at least a little, but it feels like there should be some variation that I would like.)

briantrice21• 12 years ago

A little bit of both; I'll skip unfamiliarity and get to the awkwardness.

Smalltalk lexical style makes certain kinds of notational customizations difficult to compose. I want multiple kinds of brackets that could get used for DSLs. Slate did manage to make prefixes and suffixes customizable and make much more into operators than Smalltalk allowed, at least.

But we did have extreme whitespace sensitivity between tokens so "3+4" was a single token. That was our fault, even if it enabled many interesting notations.

ericHosick• 12 years ago

Would you have time to chat, perhaps an hour, on language design? Email address is on my blog which is in my ycom bio.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

Sure. My email is my username at gmail.

raiph2• 12 years ago

Hi Brian,

I've only read a few pages of the Slate site so far but it's brought back fond memories of image based systems I played with in the 80s.

(I've done a total of about 5 years worth of professional programming over the last 30 years, primarily assembler and BCPL in the 80s and some Pascal and Perl in the 90s; I've played with many langs -- lisp, snobol, the toy smalltalkish systems Smalltalk/V and Actor, etc. -- in the late 80s; I'm currently a Perl 6 "enthusiast" -- my periodic HN search for "perl6" caught your mention of it.)

If you have little to no idea what NQP [1] is, then my question is:

What are the characteristics that a language/compiler/runtime/library have to have to adequately support an image based approach? I'm imagining OO; source code as objects; running code as objects; object serialization; incremental compilation; etc. I know I should research this myself (and will, now you've rekindled my interest) but I think your off-the-cuff answer will be an interesting and valuable start for me and perhaps others.

Or, in the unlikely event that you DO know what NQP is, then my question is:

Is it reasonable to think about building an image based system using the NQP toolchain?

Thank you offering AMA. :)

[1] https://github.com/perl6/nqp

briantrice21• 12 years ago

I've heard of NQP but haven't dug into it. I suppose you could, but I'd estimate the effort as higher than for say Rubinius which has been tracking a Smalltalk model since its inception.

Really, an image is just a heap snapshot with roundtrip serialization possibilities. You want to be able to serialize all the operational data structures, so the model of data has to sort of respect a certain abstraction layer. One consideration is whether the image has to be portable; word-size of 32 or 64 bits, or under endianness. This has strong implications about what kind of code you can keep in the image.

You also would want hooks for startup and shutdown if you expect to be able to snapshot a heap and then restart it under a debugger, say, and get the runtime circumstances that are relevant, like open sockets and files, dynamic-linked libraries, and so on.

briantrice21• 12 years ago

I will say that I'm not done yet; I fully intend to build a practical system that hands the lessons of FoNC to the everyday context. I've learned a lot over the years and tried my best to smooth out my early rough edges.

The question is how to do it and with whom and for what audience.

The Slate Programming Language

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