Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

> Inferno applications are written in Limbo®, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. It is easy to express the concurrency in the physical world directly in Limbo's syntax. Any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.

I was amazed by what a great idea this is until I got here. You have to use a special snowflake programming language.

This is the same thing that turns me off from Google's Flutter. You have to use Dart, a language not used anywhere else.

It's not that these languages are bad. They may be fine, even great. It's the cognitive load of learning yet another language. For it to make sense this language would have to be quite a bit more productive or otherwise better than Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc. Otherwise just let people use languages they know. It's not that hard. We now have WASM which can be targeted by all of those either directly or indirectly.

I built a computer with its own languages, and I consider it to be _less_ cognitive load when everything is in 1/2/3 languages. I don't have to worry that the next program I want to read the sources will require "Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc."

There are other metrics to consider besides your notions of cognitive load and productivity. Inferno predates most of the languages on your list. My computer (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) uses custom languages because I was able to design them to minimize total LoC, and to ensure the dependency graph has no cycles (unlike all of the conventional software stack, at least until https://www.gnu.org/software/mes connects up all the dots).

The Limbo language predated Go by over a decade, and is, in fact, a predecessor of Go. I think its creation and use in this system makes more sense in the context of 1995 when it was initially created.

Yeah, they both share Rob Pike and the Bell Labs heritage.

Weird side note: Renee French did both the Plan 9 and Go mascot designs as well.

https://go.dev/blog/gopher

And to the further above, there are other languages and compilers supported on Plan 9/Inferno. Like Go.

Well she is married to Rob Pike…

And Penn Jillette knew both of them and introduced them to each other.

Source: Penn's radio show where Rob and Renee were each guests at different times.

Golang and Limbo share a lot more than that!

I don't suppose there's a web page / article / etc that spells some of this out, is there?

When I try searching for "golang" and "limbo X" (where X = history, or comparison, or..., or...) it looks like the popularity of golang swamps any pages that might compare Go and Limbo.

https://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/

https://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/

https://seh.dev/go-legacy/

Thanks!

> Portable programs: Inferno programs are written in the type-safe language Limbo and compiled to Dis bytecode, which can be run without modifications on all Inferno platforms.

The point is that this and similar operating systems have sufficiently different (and better) security models that extend to the virtual machine level, which makes creating a new languages that are compatible with them necessary. Other languages could be (re)written to compile to the bytecode, or at least live in emulated environments within the safe zones.

Our current operating systems, virtual machines and languages are laughably insecure, whereas these advanced systems can give the programmer and user more control over and guarantees about the behavior of these systems.

If we keep using the current models, we'll have to keep using and building domain specific languages, container protocols, browser sandboxes, mini-vm's, all kinds of incompatible and stacked interfaces, whereas well designed systems recursively nest sandboxes gracefully.

Resource (e.g. cpu time, memory space) and access security have been utterly neglected in currently popular languages, which will haunt us again and again until we finally learn better. Newer systems like WebAssembly are starting to begin to consider at least the latter, where a program can be isolated in a sandbox with a well defined and airtight interface.

https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-even...

https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

> For it to make sense this language would have to be quite a bit more productive or otherwise better than Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc.

Concurrent programming languages are quite a bit more expressive and therefore productive for distributed systems than the languages you listed. Go, Rust, C++ JS, Python, Java etc. are all imperative languages with sequential semantics. Writing concurrent programs in these languages is much harder than using a specialized language. There's a reason Erlang and BEAM is preferred by many to write distributed systems as opposed to C++.

Languages designed with asynchronous, distributed, parallel semantics from the ground up allow a higher degree of expressivity when it comes to distributed systems. Obviously you can write anything you want in imperative languages, but the semantics really work against you to the point where concurrent programming is generally considered "hard" by users of these languages. It really don't have to be that hard, or at least not any harder than sequential programming.

I would say if you only know the languages listed, then learning a concurrent languages would expand your mind rather than burden it.

Limbo is from 95 java is from 96 js from 98, go and rust from 20xx something, and dart is made from the ground up to be compile to multiple plataforms, I wish they make kotling in the same way to be onest but I can't say is dumb flutter apps are fast in comparison to react native becouse they don't need a virtual Dom in the process

Java first release was in 1995…

If language is half decent I personally do not feel any cognitive load of learning and using it (excluding brainfuck like things of course). I do not change language for the heck of it because I am a vendor / custom product developer and need to see financial reasons first, yet it happens often enough

Reply on news.ycombinator.com