The Earl Grey programming language

http://breuleux.github.io/earl-grey/

by breuleux • 11 years ago

150 126 11 years ago

breuleux.github.io

htilford• 11 years ago

What was the inspiration to create yet another compile to JS language?

brudgers• 11 years ago

The ubiquity of the browser one would expect.

breuleux15• 11 years ago

I guess I wanted macros and pattern matching without Lisp syntax, and I wanted to retain and use the JS/node ecosystem.

There's also a few language features I couldn't find anywhere else that I wanted to try out (my % operator, ad hoc exception classes, some pattern matching features like coercion and "match" inside a pattern to define sub-patterns, the each operator, some features of the macro system that I have yet to document, etc.)

It's kind of fun, really.

visarga3• 11 years ago

What does the % operator formally do? All I could find in the documentation was :

Earl Grey's % operator can be used to easily build HTML, DOM, virtual DOM, and other things:

ffn• 11 years ago

Because folks feel there is a need for them, and it's a really good way to get one's feet wet in the compiler pound. Besides, a programming language (dialect) is to a programmer what different size wenches, pipes, or hoes are to a plumber. You need different tools for different jobs and a lot of it depends on your personal preference and what it will take you to be efficient. Besides, how we as engineers solve problems is just as much an expression of our personality as it is a statement about the correct operation of systems. But that's just my view, and I'm definitely biased on the subject because I'm working on a flavor of coffeescript that will compile to msft's typescript as we speak (well, in my spare time).

mbroshi• 11 years ago

Looks interesting, but odd that the very first code snippet is an infinite loop.

breuleux15• 11 years ago

God damn it how did I miss that. The condition was wrong, too. Fixed, thanks :)

Dewie3• 11 years ago

Why not have a "Show HN" if you're the one who made it (assuming from the URL)?

trafnar• 11 years ago

"Oh god, do we need another language that compiles to javascript?!"

—Everyone, probably

yellowapple3• 11 years ago

There shall be no peace until every language compiles to Javascript.

webjprgm6• 11 years ago

Does a VM of a PC count as a JIT compiler? Can we compile VirtualBox to JS using one of those C->JS compilers? I'm sure we can come up with some stack of turtles here ...

bbrennan• 11 years ago

JS is the new JVM. Write once, run anywhere is still the dream, I'm glad new programming languages are taking advantage of JavaScript's versatility.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 11 years ago

It's better than the JVM. It provides an excellent, high-performance runtime for dynamic languages (JS), and an excellent, high-performance runtime for static, memory-unsafe languages (asm.js)!

toyg• 11 years ago

Write once, run anywhere is still the dream

More like "write once, run in the browser". I don't think most compile-to-js languages care too much about "anywhere", they are just trying to get nicer alternatives in what is basically a platform (the browser) closed to anything except JS.

denysonique• 11 years ago

Why not? Maybe most of us are not going to use it, but the free market of growing programming languages will have an overall positive effect by inspiring other langs, such as many features of ES6 being inspired by CoffeeScript et cetera.

Competition is good, competition is creativity.

webjprgm6• 11 years ago

I like seeing the trends of what features show up frequently in new languages. These features manage to work their way into more popular languages, either as changes to existing ones like Java or C++11 or new languages like Swift and Go.

gklitt• 11 years ago

I think it's unfortunate that this is currently the top comment on this post. Someone puts hundreds of commits of work into a nifty language with a nice feature set (including compile-to-js) and awesome integrations, and this is what they get on HN...

I think this looks like a great project, we can never have too many programming languages to play around with.

msl09• 11 years ago

we can never have too many programming languages to play around with.

Wait until we start having legacy code in all those languages.

we use 30 different compile-to-js languages used in our projects(that are no longer being developed) and you have to maintain it.

bratsche• 11 years ago

That was my first reaction until I scrolled down the page a little. This language looks really nice.

braythwayt• 11 years ago

Everyone says, “We don’t need any new programming languages cluttering up code bases,” but nobody volunteers to backport their own apps to COBOL.

visarga3• 11 years ago

I quite like this one, though,

mikejholly• 11 years ago

Await, pattern matching and macros are great language features Node and CoffeeScript both lack. Nice work!

pooriaazimi• 11 years ago

IcedCoffeeScript had await/defer three of four years ago: https://github.com/maxtaco/coffee-script/

But I agree, excellent set of features.

thomasfoster96• 11 years ago

Async/await is coming in ECMAScript 7, so Node will have it soon.

Dralletje• 11 years ago

Define "soon" haha. With the speed of adopting ECMAScript 6 this "soon" could become really long.

shakethemonkey2• 11 years ago

Hyphens in variable names. It's a bold strategy for a scripting language, Cotton.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 11 years ago

Imagine being able to type style.border-width in JS instead of style.borderWidth

ghayes• 11 years ago

inner = border - width

agumonkey4• 11 years ago

You just reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets

saraid2163• 11 years ago

  style['border-width']

Shoop• 11 years ago

I think a lot of lisps use hyphens in variable names

shakethemonkey2• 11 years ago

There's plenty of precedent. It's just rare for a reason. I'm not sure allowing slightly easier access to CSS syntax justifies it.

tmalsburg2• 11 years ago

Yes, because Lisp uses prefix notation and hence there is no ambiguity: a-b cannot be interpreted as subtraction in lisp but in EG ...?

SeanLuke3• 11 years ago

Lisps do not have operators. This language does.

fenollp• 11 years ago

    fact(match) =  
       0 or 1 -> 1  
       n -> n * fact(n - 1)

why not simply

    fact(0 or 1) -> 1
    fact(n) -> n * fact(n - 1)

istvan__• 11 years ago

I think the first one is a single function that has pattern matching for the parameter while the second one is defining the function twice and relying on the language to call the right one based on the parameter.

I think in Erlang the function identification is the name and the arity and this is as close I know of what you would like to have.

TheDong• 11 years ago

In haskell you can write exactly the following:

    fact 0 = 0
    fact 1 = 1
    fact n = n * fact (n-1)

It works as you would expect and really they aren't that dissimilar.

arh68• 11 years ago

Erlang does it very much like GP's suggestion with the one downside of being 'noisy' with its punctuation (some might say 'clearer'):

  factorial(0) -> 1;
  factorial(N) -> N * factorial(N-1).

  factorial(Foo, 0) -> .. ;
  factorial(Foo, Bar) -> .. .

Semicolons separate partial definitions for a single function of a single arity, and periods end those definitions. Removing the punctuation might make parsing a bit more difficult (will there be more partial definitions?), so it's understandable to not offer it.

mikkom• 11 years ago

Erlang has both methods, pattern matching in function definition and case-clause pattern matching.

(some random link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1050913/erlang-style-case...)

akst• 11 years ago

I'd imagine you could compile them both down to the same thing, as there has to be a conditional at some point to determine what code to run (unless there was some kind of dynamic dispatch), I think it's just a matter of preference

sssilver• 11 years ago

Actually, the language looks and reads great. Keep up!

childintime• 11 years ago

is it just me, tiring quickly of this syntax?

webjprgm6• 11 years ago

I'm not a fan of using -> like CoffeeScript does. It doesn't seem to mean function-body / algorithm-to-do-the-thing to me. That operator makes sense for pointers or for function return value type expressions.

breuleux15• 11 years ago

I think that's just because you are used to see it used that way. And it's not like CoffeeScript invented this.

Haskell does it:

    \x -> x + 1

OCaml does it:

    fun (x : int) -> x + 1

It is very common in functional languages to use -> both for function bodies and return types.

davenportw15• 11 years ago

Does 'each' serve as both forEach and map? It appears that way from the fib example.

breuleux15• 11 years ago

Yes. The compiler detects whether the return value is used or not to determine whether to accumulate the results in an array or not. Also, unlike forEach and map you can use continue or break.

xxyyxx• 11 years ago

I like it. It goes further than coffeescript and livescript can. Especially with macros and better react support

makmanalp• 11 years ago

I really like how the tooling to create a full application is already there, it isn't like "here's my new language, but there are no libraries, good luck!".

Global variables need to be declared to be accessible: globals: document, google, React

If I'm getting this correctly, what a brilliant idea! Contain the shittiness by having one single location where all globals are declared. So very helpful.

baldfat2• 11 years ago

Am I the only one childish enough to ask for the language to be called Earl Grey Hot in honor of Star Trek?

gresrun• 11 years ago

The JS transpiler should be named 'picard'

webjprgm6• 11 years ago

This is also what I thought. I was disappointed to see no TNG references on the page.

ianstallings• 11 years ago

We could always write a little utility in it called Engage to make things right.

breuleux15• 11 years ago

I like Earl Grey tea, but I don't watch Star Trek, so it didn't even occur to me. Sorry about that :(

On the other hand I have to admit I like the idea of calling utilities Picard or Engage, they have a nice ring to them. Hmm.

myhf2• 11 years ago

If we write a Webpack Hot-Module-Replacement plugin for it, the natural name would be earl-grey-hot.

ChrisArchitect• 11 years ago

immediately went looking for a Tea.js.....

ufo3• 11 years ago

The "fact(match)" is very strange. In Haskell you have "lambda-case" and in Ocaml you have "fun" as syntaxes to define lambdas that pattern-match on the argument.

That said, I really like the inclusion of async and a DSL for documents. These two are things that benefit a lot from having language support.

breuleux15• 11 years ago

"fact(match)" is just making use of a generic feature: the "match" keyword in a pattern dictates that the body defines a sequence of sub-patterns to match at that position. An argument uses pattern syntax, so it works there, but it works in other situations, for example this contrived example:

    f(x, y) =
       match x:
          {m, n} ->
             match m:
                <= 0 -> n + y
                else -> m + n + y
          n -> n + y

Can be rewritten:

    f(match x, y) =
       {match m, n} ->
          <= 0 -> n + y
          else -> m + n + y
       n -> n + y

So you can match hierarchically like that (sorry if the example is strange, it's not supposed to mean anything).

ufo3• 11 years ago

Is there any other language that does this? For me the second example doesn't look better than the first one.

petegrif• 11 years ago

This language has it down to a tea.

karmakaze• 11 years ago

Hope it fares better than Ceylon.

andrezsanchez2• 11 years ago

Glad to see this addressed CoffeeScript's silly issue of variable scope by just requiring a `var` statement like regular JS.

Also, love the name :)

visarga3• 11 years ago

I love the name but it will get mixed up a lot on Google searches. Just like it was with the TV series "24" that matched every 24 that was to be found online.

loopbit• 11 years ago

I typed 'earl grey language' and the first three results refer to this, the HN article is in fifth position.

The same as typing '24 tv series' will mostly return relevant results.

evincarofautumn• 11 years ago

One one hand, this is yet another syntactic reskin of ideas from modern imperative-land. On the other hand, it looks like a good one, by a thoughtful author who also cares about integration with existing platforms, and that’s not nothing.

moomin2• 11 years ago

Now add an absolutely vital library called Milk and watch tea lovers everywhere shudder.

relet• 11 years ago

earl-mocha should be bad enough.

IsTom• 11 years ago

There's nothing wrong with milk tea.

spacemanmatt4• 11 years ago

Made correctly, earl grey (really any black tea) needs some milk fat to neutralize the tannic acid or it could turn your stomach.

spacemanmatt4• 11 years ago

...now it occurs that maybe the GP comment meant shudder in a good way. In which case, well played. Quite cricket, my good man.

rev_bird• 11 years ago

I've thought milk in tea was so silly for years, and you've changed my mind in one sentence. Thank you, did not realize there was a practical reason for making it... taste worse.

CocaKoala• 11 years ago

I had actually noticed that I didn't feel great after drinking earl grey without milk, but never realized why. Thanks for mentioning this!

breuleux15• 11 years ago

I googled this because I find it interesting, but black tea does not contain tannic acid. It contains tannins, but of a completely different type (antioxydants which actually seem to be healthy). I couldn't find anything definitive on whether adding milk is a good idea or not. Maybe it helps for some people.

andrezsanchez2• 11 years ago

I drink milk in my tea a lot so I'd be fine with it haha

moomin2• 11 years ago

From the replies, it's clear the "one should never put tea in Earl Grey" meme isn't as widespread as I thought.

M8• 11 years ago

What level of automated refactoring and IDE integration does it offer?

myhf2• 11 years ago

The maximum possible level: a self-hosting compiler.

Grue3• 11 years ago

Looks like another Coffeescript. Braces/parens are not bad, they structure the code and make it easier for the eyes. Lack of punctuation is as bad as too much punctuation.

explorigin• 11 years ago

High-level comparison with Haxe:

EG and Haxe share: - compiles to Javascript - Macros - Pattern Matching - async/await (Haxe requires a 3rd party macro lib, but it integrates well)

EG has: - cleaner syntax - document-building DSL - "One of EG's primary goals is to be as compatible as possible with existing JavaScript libraries and frameworks and the node/iojs ecosystem." (Haxe makes compromises here to support other platforms)

Haxe has: - static type-checking - dead-code elimination - support for more platform targets (PHP, Python, C#, Java and more) - years of experience

danneu• 11 years ago

Great README.

Gives me a good sip of the entirety: the syntax, macros, patmatching, integrating with React, and even how to gulp it and write tests with it. Yet succinct enough to scroll in one swipe.

dwg• 11 years ago

As someone who currently uses LiveScript professionally, I look forward to trying out Earl Grey. At first glance it looks very promising.

I'm aware there are many people who don't see the value in creating "yet another compiles to JS language," or those who view them as simply "syntax sugar," but I for one very much appreciate the work done by yourself and others on similar projects.

hderms• 11 years ago

This is just extremely exciting. I love the language design and it looks usable as all hell. First compile-to-js language I've ever seen that got me excited, let alone the first one that i'd actually use outside of the browser. Congrats.

The Earl Grey programming language

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