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Show HN: Fluent, tiny lang for reactivity and autograd (mlajtos.github.io)
6 points by mlajtos 14 days ago
After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming.

Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape.

The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here.

Hope you hate/like it!
1 comments
sightspinner 14 days ago
Was this just for fun/practice or are you trying to solve some problem/do something more efficiently? Surely, there are languages the calculate exact derivatives already?
link
mlajtos 14 days ago
Fluent is attacking multiple problems.

On the surface, it blends APL and LISP. Making S/M-exprs terse and building “diamond-less” left-to-right APL on top. This part is pretty okay.

In core, unification of FRP and AD as already mentioned. This is mainly to do efficient online/incremental learning. Currently this is a disaster and main source of tech debt. I got some attacks.

Fun and curiosity is the main motivator. Having single system that can do user-editable explorable ML explanations is just cherry on top.

link