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by jcburnham 1833 days ago
I didn't claim that we have solved or will solve the diversity problem, but I did articulate in the README a few ways that I thought Yatima might contribute.

I also don't agree with your characterization of Haskell, Rust and OCaml as being "high-barrier-to-entry" compared to Python. Personally, I find languages like Python much harder to work with given how arbitrary and detail oriented they are. I think for a lot of people that kind of language is fine. Those people are already well served by existing resources.

The people I want to reach are people who have not yet been exposed to a presentation of mathematics or computer science as an elegant unified field, where proofs are programs and theorems are types. This is what I would have responded well to as a kid who detested Math and CS well into my late teens. Much of what is marketed as "accessible" or "educational" in programming languages comes across as patronizing, a lot of visual programming languages are guilty of this. That approach would also not have worked for me.

So what I'm doing instead is building a language that I would thought was awesome when I was 12. Will that work for everyone, who knows? Probably not. But it would have worked for me, and if there are other people out there in the same situation, then that's good enough motivation for me to keep building.

2 comments

> I also don't agree with your characterization of Haskell, Rust and OCaml as being "high-barrier-to-entry" compared to Python. Personally, I find languages like Python much harder to work with given how arbitrary and detail oriented they are.

This is an interesting POV to be sure, but it should be made more practical and testable, by writing introductory resources for the average user that are targeted to these languages. Right now, the closest comparison to your prospective design for Yatima might actually be ATS, and I have trouble seeing ATS as figuring in a "Programming 101" tutorial.

There's definitely some similarities to ATS conceptually, but not that much in the actual implementation, and definitely not in the syntax.

That said, Hongwei Xi is a genius, and ATS is one of the most important and innovative languages of the past decade, despite the crazy syntax (seriously, t@ype for the sort of flat memory types is just bonkers). I'm really looking forward to ATS3 though https://github.com/githwxi/ATS-Xanadu, and I think there's chance it could gain serious traction.

At last I truly see. Thanks.

Do you think the math emphasis of your language would make it an especially good introductory language for mathematicians?