PlanOut: A language and interpreter

facebook.github.io

48 points·ebakshy··5 comments

Interesting. I'm working on an "Expfile" project right now, which is tangentially related to this area of exploration. The idea is that published experiments should be reproducible, and therefore can be described in a declarative format. I'm calling Expfile the "Procfile for experiments" -- it's a file you upload in the top level of your research's code repository, describing in declarative terms which variables to measure, how to measure them, and how to get results. If anyone wants to talk to me about this I'm doing a lot of work on it this week.

Wasn't there recently something on HN about a programming language for science experiments? Anyone know what it was called again? It'd be interesting to compare the two languages.

AFAIK there aren't any other languages implementing scientific experiments, although there was a recent article about a port of the PlanOut interpreter to Go [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8723536] -- so maybe that's what you are thinking of?

We have been doing a lot of recent development on the PlanOut language and interpreter itself, and hadn't really emphasized that part of PlanOut was first open-sourced. URX's ongoing port of Go prompted me to improve the documentation for the interpreter, and also open source parts of the React-based editor we use to develop PlanOut experiments at Facebook.

I just spent some time re-finding that post a few days ago at an Ethereum meetup! :)

http://www.antha-lang.org/

Yeah! Antha was what I was thinking about. Thanks for looking it up!

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