The Q# Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

The Q# Programming Language

docs.microsoft.com

120 pointsrbanffy60 comments

Maybe some HN reader who is more familiar with quantum computing can help me answer this question: how broadly applicable is quantum computing? I know that it breaks some forms of cryptography and reduces the security of others, but aside from that I haven't heard of many practical uses for it. Is it destined to remain a niche area of computing or is it more broadly applicable than I've been led to believe?

I think "broadly applicable" is not yet something we can state definitively, because the technology itself is not broadly available. I think it would be like trying to guess if the first computer made by Alan Turing would be broadly applicable at the time it was invented - he surely thought so, yet its invention was only realized in response to code breaking during WWII.

However, the applications are numerous far beyond cryptography. Quantum computing is an entirely different fundamental type of computing that accepts uncertainty at its core, which is actually quite a powerful concept in and of itself. I mean, imagine Boolean logic.. true, false... and now you have "maybe" (due to the nature of qubits)... I think that for stochastic/random processes and modeling the real world, the uncertainty can be a very powerful tool. Of course, that's just one small part of quantum computing.

Here's some more info from DWave's website about applications: https://www.dwavesys.com/tutorials/background-reading-series...

I am curious if there is a link between Google Deepmind and DWave, but not sure there is one.

Not sure of the down vote here. I think that existing concepts such as ternary logic[1] prove the applicability of alternative (alternative to binary I mean), multi-state computing models already.

So, quantum processing is a different computing model and programming model, which up until recently has been too complicated to be in reach of the public, much like the Turing machine once was. I suspect with advances in cloud computing and programming tools like this Q# language, it will bring these advanced capabilities to a wider mass and then the techology's full potential can be more fully realized.

I understand the parent's question, but perhaps an actual quantum computing scientist could answer here instead of me.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic

Quantum computing will not replace your word processor, and we don't need it for things like building websites, apps, or really most software...of course, there are potential applications in AI, but that aside it's not generally applicable in that sense. However, when it comes to scientific computing, or the development of new technologies, materials, medicines, etc...it's potential applications within those domains are likely transformative. Without going into too much detail, everything you see around you(chemicals, compounds, etc) can be broken down within the theory of QED(quantum electrodynamics) ultimately, and quantum computers can do calculations for QED/quantum chemistry much better than classical computers...so the question becomes...what can you do now that you can simulate reality much more accurately? These are likely to be the most important applications for the next 5-10-15 years.

Germans will probably call it Quiz :D

(Haltone increases (#) bring the suffix 'is' (like F# == Fis) and 'Q-is' sounds pretty much like 'Quiz')

I haven't talked to German programmers lately. Is C# pronounced "Cis"?

The musical note C# is pronounced Cis, the programming language is pronounced C-sharp. Same for F#

If only there were a convenient way to enter rare characters on ordinary keyboards. There would be no more confusion between the musical note C𝄰 and the programming language C#. Or maybe the language would be called C𝄱 instead, confusing everyone to no end. (Those are three different symbols.)

EDIT: It appears that HN eats the "music sharp sign" character, but not "musical sharp up" or "musical sharp down".

For the record I only see the programming language #, neither of the other two.

I have not heard a single person here (Berlin) pronounce any of the # languages "is"-anything. Everyone I know just calls it C-Sharp.

I know people who say it jokingly. Never met anyone who meant it seriously.

Well, nowadays professional programmers call it C-Sharp, but some years ago there were a lot of people calling it Cis.

EDIT: While C-Sharp is the correct pronunciation there were even books calling is Cis: https://books.google.de/books?id=srryCQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&dq=pro...

In dutch C# is pronounced as Cis, yes. So I think in German as well. Though a programmer will still stay C-sharp.

How do they pronounce D-flat?

While we're at it, are Dis, Fis, Gis and Ais the other sharps?

D-flat is "Des". Dis, Fis, Gis and Ais are indeed the other sharps

Are there any open source developments in quantum computing? MS seems to be doing a lot in this area but I'd hate to be limited to what they offer.

Rigetti Computing has a Github repository with a reference implementation for their quantum virtual machine and other stuff: https://github.com/rigetticomputing

There is also Quantum computer playground by Google: http://www.quantumplayground.net/

Here's list of various QC simulators: https://www.quantiki.org/wiki/list-qc-simulators

Microsoft's Language Integrated Quantum Operations Simulator is available on Github http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/

That is not open source. Note that the meat of it is in the form of compiled binaries in the /bin directory: https://github.com/StationQ/Liquid/tree/master/bin

In this case, GitHub isn’t being used so much as an open source collaboration tool, but rather a file host.

There's Quipper - a language for describing quantum algorithms:

http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/quipper/

I wonder if resharper supports q#?

Anyone else notice how the <title> of this page is "Intent and product brand in a unique string of 43-59 chars including spaces | Microsoft Docs"?

Which is obviously a placeholder, so I wonder how much Microsoft really cared about this release.

I wonder how much Microsoft really cared about this release.

Or someone could have made a mistake.

Thanks for pointing out this mistake. I'll let the right person know to get this updated.

Some context: Every article on docs.microsoft.com is written in markdown. However there is some additional metadata front matter that is easy to overlook (and new authors may not always be familiar with it). I certainly have done that before myself.

Disclaimer: I'm a Developer Advocate for Azure. My parent group also owns the docs.microsoft.com infrastructure.

I laughed at this:

Some of this accidentally made it into production :) We're working on fixing this.

Of course, that's why I wonder if they really cared or if it was just a mistake.

Another one of their pages (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-techniques-...) has this, as well as git merge issues and an improperly generated link...

Thanks! I'll let the authors know!

PM on docs.microsoft.com team - already working on fixing this, thanks for the feedback!

The titles are now fixed!

At least one link still shows the outdated title. See second paragraph under “Grouping” in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-expressi...

Should be fixed as well, thanks for the report!

It's funny. Reading all these reports/comments from hackernews about all the glitches in the document. "This will be fixed, thx" there and "I reported this, thx". Looks like Hackernews is part of the Quality Assurance process of Microsoft.

Here is one more from my side, (having wrong title) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/quantum-qr-statemen...

Or maybe it's a draft document? It's obviously a side project in any case.

Can we get a mod to update the title?

;)

> coltonv 1 hour ago

Stolen comment valor

> __pandaman64__ 11 hours ago

> The title of this page seems to be the default string ("Intent and product brand in a unique string of 43-59 chars including spaces").

Once one person notices the title of a page, for the rest of time nobody else is able to notice the same?

The original comment was already on docs.microsoft.com and served no purpose being repeated here aside from being a vehicle to look like a smug prick

Fact: any time anything is discussed anywhere, it can never be discussed on any other forum ever again forever. Doing so would make the person who discussed it the second time be a smug prick for not checking to make sure his comment was wholly original.

The comment being posted here got the attention of at least two Microsoft employees, including dend, the PM on the docs team who got the issue fixed.

Still waiting for C99 to happen. If they dedicated just a fraction of the effort put into C#, VB.Net, and PowerShell we could have had a proper, modern C frontend written from scratch.

Jeez. First curl and now q?

Well, if Microsoft isn't going to give a fuck about implied trademarks, and just aim to be as confusing as possible, I think we can introduce the "windows programming language"...

I'm an ignorant pleb, is this the Q you're thinking of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from_K...

If so, honestly seems kind of esoteric and I'm not really offended by Microsoft using that letter.

>seems kind of esoteric

Which is a bit unfortunate, because (APL-like) array languages, of which Q appears to be one of the more approachable/popular, have a lot of very interesting ideas that I think mainstream languages could benefit from. Their unpopularity is self-inflicted due to the wacky syntax, of course.

Any good infos/articles/series compelling the mainstream-language practitioners of such interesting-ideas while ideally hiding away their wacky-syntax as much as possible?

> honestly seems kind of esoteric

Q# is more esoteric than Q is.

Has far fewer users, and in every way less of a claim to the name.

... just like "curl".

> I'm not really offended by Microsoft using that letter

Okay, but I am. Now what?

> Q# is more esoteric than Q is.

That in no way negates my point. It's not a question of which is more obscure, but that the 'original' item is obscure in the first place.

One unknown language reusing part of another's name means that nobody's gonna be legitimately confused or misled here. Moreover, they derive practically no benefit whatsoever by piggybacking on the (limited) fame of the 'original'. Curl is a different story altogether.

> That in no way negates my point.

I thought you were genuinely confused as to why I was offended and was responding as such.

I had no idea that you believed your lack of opinion and offence somehow invalidated mine.

> One unknown language reusing part of another's name means that nobody's gonna be legitimately confused or misled here

I'm not going to agree that q is generally "unknown" just because you don't know what it is.

> I had no idea that you believed your lack of opinion and offence somehow invalidated mine.

Not at all. Your opinion is hilarious, but everyone's entitled to an opinion.

Sincere question: Does C# offend you?

> Sincere question: Does C# offend you?

No. C# has some relationship with C and C++ and it's clear that Microsoft wants us to think about the C-ness of C# when we see the "C" in C#; C's implied trademark is being respected here.

Now my turn for a sincere question:

If someone gets the name "curl" and everyone in a market understands that name means something, and someone comes around and uses the name for something else[1], why do you think that's okay?

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20160819042745/https://github.com... (archive.org link since github is taking a long time to load)

>If someone gets the name "curl" and everyone in a market understands that name means something, and someone comes around and uses the name for something else[1], why do you think that's okay?

I never said it was ok. I actually didn't know about this until this thread and didn't know the details until I read the link you posted. I think that is shady and wrong. On top of that, curl is so popular that it is hard to believe those who implemented that command in Powershell did not know about that already.

That said, when it comes to a language it is entirely possible for people to not know that a language Q already exists. Also, it is going to be hard to confuse the two languages when searching for resources, since majority of people looking for Q# resources are going to actually be typing in "Q#" and not "Q". On top of that, Q being the first letter in quantum and it being a language designed for quantum computing makes sense. Plus they add their signature # at the end which they seem to like to do for new languages (J#, C#, F#). Unlike curl, I see very little malice in the naming of the Q# language

EDIT: I have another sincere question for you: What are your thoughts on the J[0] and J#[1] programming language names? Microsoft created J# as a bridge between Java and Visual J++ to transition to .NET. This was in 2002, 12 years after the J programming language first appeared.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_(programming_language)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Sharp

> when it comes to a language it is entirely possible for people to not know that a language Q already exists.

I don't buy it.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=q+programming+language

> it is going to be hard to confuse the two languages when searching for resources, since majority of people looking for Q# resources are going to actually be typing in "Q#" and not "Q".

Again, I don't buy it.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=q%23+programming+language

Try harder.

> they add their signature # at the end which they seem to like to do for new languages (J#, C#, F#).

which follow Java, C, and System F.

Don't search engines ignore `#` anyways?

Searching `q#` vs `q` seems to bring up the same results for me.

Not GP, but I initially though Q# was some sort of CLI (another great name there) version of Q, in the same sense that C# (like C++) signifies some sort of augmented version of C.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

It's a letter. Come on.

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