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Comment by smallstepforman | Hacker News Reader

I was really excited to discover Pony a couple of years ago, sadly there is negative momentum with this project. So much potential, yet the world isn’t ready for it yet.

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I looked into Pony some time ago and I always found the capabilities-thing to be quite complex although very interesting. It was hard to imagine using it in a project with developers unfamiliar to this concept. Especially since I was mostly working on large web applications where only tiny parts were actually using shared state between threads.

TBF I have never written Pony code, I was mostly reading documentation.

Or Pony is not ready for the world. I mean, they don't even have arithmetic operator precedences [1]. If you're doing things concurrently it must be something uber-important, like censoring cat pictures, but apparently not arithmetics.

[1] https://github.com/aksh98/Pony_Documentation#precedence

>Or Pony is not ready for the world. I mean, they don't even have arithmetic operator precedences

Many languages don't have arithmetic operator precedence (Smalltalk, Lisp, etc) and that's fine.

It's not some feature that's missing, it's a design choice.

In Lisp and Smalltalk it's obvious enough how composite expressions are evaluated, and they don't have the usual infix syntax to begin with. Pony does and the different precedences are just a bad surprise. As far as that's a design decision, I'd call it bad design.

>In Lisp and Smalltalk it's obvious enough how composite expressions are evaluated, and they don't have the usual infix syntax to begin with.

That's Lisp. In Smalltalk they do (have the usual infix syntax).

> have the usual infix syntax

Isn't it the case that all operators in Smalltalk have the same precedence and left-to-right associativity? That's not "the usual" infix syntax.

Usual referring to the mere "infix syntax" part (as opposed to some other kind of syntax that isn't infix).

Not to having "infix syntax plus the associativity / precedence you get in C". We've already established that it doesn't have the usual precedence.

The distinction was with e.g. Lisp which has a prefix syntax (polish notation), and other more exotic styles.

If you're going to complain about that, you might as well mention that the run-time system puts the terminal into a weird, pseudo-raw state that makes stdin/stdout act kind of funny, if you're not expecting it.

Does have a nice readline integration, though.

Mind explaining what you mean by 'negative momentum'? I'd never heard of Pony before and only took a look at it just now.

The problem with fancy new programming languages is that no big company is willing to back it and then actually use it (this is the most important step). But languages without backing/usage go nowhere and then get donated to the apache or eclipse foundation.

unless they invented it, then it is flying monkeys everywhere.

You sure about that? Sylvan Clebsch [1] -- Pony's creator -- is now part of Microsoft Research [2], has been working on a distributed actor model, and is presenting on Pony at QCon London next week [3].

[1] https://github.com/sylvanc

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/syclebsc/

[3] https://qconlondon.com/speakers/sylvan-clebsch

Pony: Co-Designing a Type System and a Runtime [video] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/pony-co-desig...

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