A Programming Language for the Internet of Things [pdf]

TLDR: Event-oriented scripting language "Daspel" with dynamic typing, targeting the Internet of Things. The syntax is inspired by C, JavaScript and Rust. The interpreter implemented in Rust, runs on RasPi 3 with sense hat. Author seems to regret dynamic typing. Rust Sense Hat bindings might be interesting: https://github.com/CodeGradox/Rust-Sense-Hat -- the PDF has links to all other project repositories on page 62.

An interesting detail:

> For this project it is assumed that IoT devices do not have an FPU [...] real in Daspel is a signed two’s-complement 32-bit fixed point number. It uses 16 bits to represent the integer part and 16 bits to represent the fractional part.

That makes sense from an implementation point of view, but it could require a real shift in thinking for programmers, do to the extremely limited range.

If you don't have an FPU, another option could be to use rationals - a pair of half-size integers, where the value is the ratio between them. Has any language tried that? It's sort of simple, but inefficient (because there are many representations for the same value, eg 2/1 and 4/2), and you need to calculate lots of GCDs to prevent overflow. On the other hand, it can exactly represent base-ten fractions, which might be handy.

an "IoT device" is still a computer, why does it need a new language? So I did RTFM and got to this part: "There is always a possibility that something were to go wrong with the program as it is sent to the device. For example, it is not impossible that bits get flipped or that some packets with the data are lost. The compiler would have to support a wide range of different architectures. That said, this argument may be mute as an interpreter must be able to run on different architectures."

Verifying a compiled executable with a checksum must outweight the bloat of shipping an interpreter with every (low power) device. SO I stopped reading at that point.

I'm one of the many people who have designed yet another little language; mine is Best Calculator BASIC and a manual for it is at https://bestcalculator.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/bestcalcu...

BC BASIC is designed to write "little programs" by relatively inexperienced programmers. As such - The IDE is small (Visual Studio is 10 Gig; mine entire thing is about 50 meg) - The IDE includes tons of examples (similar to how the Arduino IDE has tons of examples) and there are fully explained examples in the manual - There is direct support for writing CSV and JSON output. It will convert an array of data, for example, directly to a correctly formatted CSV line. You can read in CSV files, too. - A number of common Bluetooth devices have built-in support. Using a TI SensorTag or a Puck.Js device is simple instead of being a maze of Bluetooth services and characteristics.

What I've found to be real winners for design:

Lots of examples is a real win

Being able to copy-and-paste is very nice. For example, when you paste most code into a modern email client, the quotes get changed to smart quotes. My language allows for smart-quotes, and so the language doesn't get mangled. More subtly, a minus sign will get changed to an em-dash or similar, and my language handles those, too

Direct support for CSV/JSON and common Bluetooth devices is a big win.

Not worrying about where files and projects go is a win. In my system, when you write a program, the IDE simply keeps track of it. It also uses Windows data roaming, so you write on one device and it's automatically sent to you other devices.

What isn't important is program speed. Yes, a company like GM might spend a couple hundred thousand making a language more efficient so they can buy a $0.24 device instead of a $0.25 device. At their scale, it makes a difference. For everyone else, the cost of programmer time vastly outweighs pretty much every other consideration.

Also not important are most of the language details. People who aren't full-time programmers will pretty much find all syntax to be weird and won't appreciate clever or subtle features.

There's a more embedded/low-power device friendly language called NesC that's embedded in a (mildly popular) distro called TinyOS. https://github.com/tinyos/nesc

The compiler for TinyOS produces whole-program-optimized, statically linked binaries, which alone is worth it to me.

Is it...Java?

Seriously. In the late 90s all the articles talked about how Java was going to enable us to talk to all of our appliances, and then it ended up being a web language.

I don't understand why we need a special language for IoT. RasPi is more powerful than computers which we had 20 years ago and we were fine using many language which we have today.

Programmers often are too focused on textual programming languages, missing out the immense improvements in visual tools, making them production ready for complex domains(for example , the recent low-code tools trend for app/site development among enterprises. And yes the right visual tools can even scale to large complex programs well, maybe with 90% visual "code" and 10% textual "code").

And clearly, visual tools are much more accessible for the amateur developer and domain expert.

And if you want to learn about that field, and the future of much of programming(probably), i'm not sure HN is a good place to do so. I think Google will be much more helpful.