Quorum: The world's first evidence-oriented programming language | Hacker News Reader

Quorum: The world's first evidence-oriented programming language

quorumlanguage.com

21 pointsdoty27 comments

I would strongly suggest having a paragraph, right on the home page, explaining what an "evidence-oriented" language is and how it differs from conventional languages.

In other words, consider looking at your home page through the eye of someone who knows NOTHING about what you are doing.

Amen. Also, zooming on the "about" page is super broken on desktop Chrome, the text does not reflow after zooming in.

Here's the explanation of the "evidence-oriented" wording for people who also had a hard time finding it: http://www.quorumlanguage.com/evidence.php

I'm going to call B.S. on this approach. When you look at the language it looks suspiciously like most other programming languages in terms of syntax.

What it's telling us is that the evidence is that most people kind of like their own programming language and want to modify nits.

The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully different. They certainly are not going to find anything that aligns with real ergonomic research into language design, like that done by PPIG ( http://www.ppig.org/ ) and other groups.

> it looks suspiciously like most other programming languages in terms of syntax.

Why would this be a criticism? Many languages have been aligning syntactically for decades.

> The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully different.

Given their rigorous evidenciary method is a byline "Submitted claims will be examined by experts in potentially a variety of fields (e.g., statistics, experimental design, psychology, computer science).", that's likely.

Looks like an attempt to introduce some measure of scientific rigor to the design-by-committee paradigm, with a new programming language as its goal. Interesting, it could lead to some good ideas.

I'll wager that it won't be possible to assess many of the choices involved in a completely objective way, since the participants in each study will have prejudices and familiarities which will bias the results. Because of the science-oriented positioning, my guess is this language will be somewhat like Python (not that that is a bad thing).

Your summary seems accurate, but if we are understanding correctly, I don't think what they're attempting is even possible.

The problem is that all the features of a language interact, and scientific experiments try to isolate variables. So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.

If someone can provide an example of evidence-based language design, I'd be interested. But right now I don't really see it.

Why not have an evidence-based car or plane design? Like programming languages, these things are complex enough that they require historical exemplars and rules of thumb. You can't really expect to explore the design space from scratch.

> So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.

That's a plausible outcome. It may not be possible to design a best-in-class language without some kind of top-down planning, or even without an auteur like Matz or Hejlsberg managing the vision part. "Benevolent dictators" are also common in large and successful software projects, so maybe there's something to that.

However, it's also possible that relying on formal empiricism for language design will lead to at least a few breakthroughs. It might require another auteur to synthesize them into a great language, but the discovery would still be valuable.

Even if the evidence based advancement only helps them iterate reliably towards a local maximum it could still work out really quite well.

Subjective-C?

This is basically a crowd-sourced programming language with fact-checking (by experimentation, on proposals before they are added).

A reductive explanation, yes, but I don't think it's inaccurate, based on what I could find on their site. Would love to be corrected if there's some large part I missed.

As far as actually constructive criticism, I'd really love it if this was the first thing I saw on quorumlang's homepage.

A quick look through the docs didn't tell me what is special about this.

Same. Had a quick look at the doc, the reference and the about. No where is "evidence-based programming language" explained.

I tried the online console: "Error: Could not connect to server". Great.

It seems they're trying to design a programming language based on usability studies in academic literature?

These feels like a terrible idea. Language designer now equals literature reviewer. But who knows, maybe they'll come up with something good?

Some sample code:

  text dna = "GATTACA"
  text msg = "Welcome to " + dna
  output msg

Unfortunately the interpreter at [0] isn't working ("Error: Could not connect to server:")

[0] http://www.quorumlanguage.com/documents/hourofcode/part1.php

EDIT: fix code formatting

Err, so if `type expr` is a variable declaration and `function expr` is a function call, how are you supposed to tell the difference between them?

Perhaps by the limited vocabulary from which `type` can be drawn, i.e. don't name your function `text` ?

It doesn't have user-defined types?!

"Programming languages should be designed with human factors as a primary concern.

Traditional programming languages have been designed predominately with technical concepts and machines in mind. While such concerns are obviously critical, human beings ultimately use such tools in the broad development community. In evidence-oriented programming, human factors evidence takes a first-class seat in the language's design. All factors related to programming are considered, up for debate, and are subject to change if a community member shows rigorous evidence that another approach is better. This is true both for technical and human factors considerations. To our knowledge, Quorum is the first programming language to attempt this."

http://quorumlanguage.com/evidence.php

So Quorum refers to developers coming to an consensus on what programming approach is better technical or not..

Isn't this how the world wound up with Ada?

My thoughts exactly. The resemblance is pretty striking.

While in theory, it seems a good idea, in practice I'm not so sure about their results: for example using '+' for string concatenation while present in many languages is IMHO a bad idea: D use '~' instead: much cleaner to distinguish addition and concatenation otherwise x[] + y[] is ambiguous: element wise addition, concatenation? Who knows..

Looks interesting but sadly I couldn't find even one example of how evidence influenced the design.

IIRC their first experiments focused on the names of keywords and types, where they found, e.g. that "text" is a more familiar type name than "string". Presumably they'll later apply the same approach to syntax and then semantics.

I'm still trying to figure out what an "evidence-oriented programming language" is...

Apparently they're basing this design on experimental feedback from programmers or something.

I'm skeptical of this going anywhere, but it's an interesting academic exercise.

>Apparently they're basing this design on experimental feedback from programmers or something.

reminds about that quote of Ford and horse carriage.

What about the coq proof assistant that must have been before this

https://coq.inria.fr

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