Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dmitrykan 1710 days ago
Thanks for sharing! The practical value of such languages could be to build an interlingua and support Python->Ć->Go. The question is: if Ć->Python works seamlessly, how easy it is to make the opposite translation? For instance, take some code that uses external library, like spacy.

If this becomes ever possible, it is going to be revolutionary.

1 comments

Very and very hard if you're aiming for readability. Ć should be "intersection" of all supported languages in a sense, so it does not support features unless all targets do. For Python that would be dynamic typing.

Of course, it's possible to introduce a type like 'any' which can refer to any object, but then you essentially get untyped Ć which results in untyped Go. Which is not really Go anymore, it's more of a Python interpreter.

Thanks! One practical target I imagine having is: 1. write the program in Python. 2. translate it into Ć ("interlingua") 3. compile Ć into Go -- for instance there is a belief around me, that Python is not suitable for web scale loads, while Go is more suitable.

Go source code / binary in this case are of less importance for code readability, because they are meant for production deployments. Something that happened in GWT: write in Java, compile into JavaScript.