Pogoscript – a compile-to-JS language that emphasises concurrency, readability | Hacker News Reader

Pogoscript – a compile-to-JS language that emphasises concurrency, readability

pogoscript.org

66 pointsnetworked19 comments

I very much like this model, but I wonder how necessary it is when we have IcedCoffeescript [1], ES6 generators + co [2], and ES7 async/await [3] as viable ways of managing async control flow within mostly synchronous-looking code, all as dialects of languages that have strong adoption.

I actually think generators + co is a really strong model. Async/await gives you a slight bit of sugar, but I've realized that if you stick with generators, you can wrap your generators to allow you to `yield` more than just promises, effectively giving you something like (untyped) scoped continuations [4].

[1] https://maxtaco.github.io/coffee-script/

[2] https://github.com/tj/co

[3] http://masnun.com/2015/11/11/using-es7-asyncawait-today-with...

[4] http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2015/08/07/scoped-continuati...

> But async IO was seriously complicated. I mean, complicated in a way that made you think, which is not usually a bad thing, but eventually you just want to get stuff done. [1]

Couldn't agree more, very interesting solution you've come up with!

[1] http://pogoscript.org/2012/12/05/async.html

Shameless plug - CSPJS - a sweetjs macro that supports a similar async mechanism and (imho) better error handling facilities.

https://github.com/srikumarks/cspjs

Have been using it in a production system for a year now.

Very interesting! Can you tell us a little bit more about how you wrote the transpiler?

Great, another non-standard and obscure way to write Javascript.

Nobody is forcing you to use it.

Until your boss or client thinks it's a good idea. :)

You have only one job, and that's to do what the client wants. It doesn't matter what language that is in. And you're free to leave whenever you want.

What is the weather like on the Planet of the Obscure Language Clients? Is there any way I can book passage there?

Why, if I had a nickel every time I was forced to turn down a client who demanded the project be done in Clojure, Scheme, Haskell, Pogoscript, or Brainfuck... I would have zero cents.

Then you've got a shitty boss or client if they're forcing this completely unknown and unsupported language on you.

I think you addressed the point I wanted to make better than I could myself with the words "unknown" and "unsupported".

Come on. Every project has to start somewhere.

True. I have no opinion on this project, apart from being impressed by someone making their own x-compile-to-JS language.

But a boss shouldn't _force_ something this immature onto their devs.

Yes, but all these JavaScript transpilers ultimately make for a healthy ecosystem. Arguably, we'd all be using the Erlang VM instead of Node if the Erlang community had more than just Elixir as a transpiled launguage. But it is a challenge for the JS community to sort through the tools explosion of the past 2 years.

Pogoscript -> JavaScript examples

http://www.featurist.co.uk/pogo-examples/

I can't get the concurrent stat example from http://pogoscript.org/2012/12/05/async.html to work. It doesn't do anything when run. I think it's exiting at the first async call.

My shell session: http://codepad.org/xWoOrHpe

How do I fix this?

This is pretty cool, but nitpick: asynchronicity != concurrency. Workers are the only way to do concurrency in JavaScript at this time, and none of the example code is demonstrating anything involving Workers.

Concurrency is the property that two or more tasks may be interleaved, instead of requiring one task to complete before another begins. Thus async I/O would only be distinguishable from sync I/O if there were concurrency, i.e., another task can run while the first task is waiting for the completion of that async I/O.

What you're talking about is parallelism, which is the property that more than one task may execute at the same time. That is what Web Workers achieve.

Talk by Rob Pike explaining the difference: http://youtu.be/cN_DpYBzKso

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