I'm not sure where or how to convey this, because I've seen several of these languages designed with AI, documentation created using AI, etc -- posted on Hacker News in the last months or so, and I've responded to each one with roughly the same feedback (and I'm assuming good faith: that the intent is that the poster wishes to grow as a language designer).
Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect. Otherwise, why should they give you the time of day? Why would you expect them to respond positively to effort alone when effort (in code and in shit prose) is extremely cheap right now? Their time is not cheap ...
When I read the documentation, and it is extremely clear that you haven't taken the time to clarify your ideas, when much of it is LLM prose, when much of the content introduces highfalutin ideas without motivation, blending categorical concepts (which, by the way, should never be mixed with vague prose claims about the language), violating my reader context model, preventing me from understanding what problem exactly your language design is solving (where is that problem stated clearly?), it is a waste of my time.
> The work took 3 weeks in total ... it's worth a look, and I hope it will win some converts, and that someone will want to help me with its development.
You've gone too fast, too much is vague, nothing is clear.
I'd delete everything, start over, and try and explain just one of the ideas clearly. Seriously. This sounds harsh, but it's honestly the correct approach to something as subtle and nuanced as programming language design.
> Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect.
I just want to amplify this point. As I was reading this, the LLMisms kept jumping out at me and each one felt like the author looking at me and deciding that my time spent reading this prose wasn't actually worth anything to them.
OP: I want YOUR thoughts, not the next token predictions of a gigantic pile of matrix multiplications. I want your awkward sentences, grammar mistakes, half-baked thoughts, self-doubt, silly jokes. I don't want this pile of grandiose mechanical slop completely devoid of humanity.
Just a comment: this sounds a lot like when someone I knew mildly succumbed to AI psychosis, and thought he, with Gemini, had made some physics/metaphysics breakthrough. If you’re losing sleep and feeling distressed or euphoric, maybe lay off for a few days, no matter how hard that is. Talk to friends and/or family about unimportant things. Get outside for a while. Go back to old hobbies (reading, hiking, just going to coffee shops or thrift stores - whatever) and then reassess.
This language looks interesting, but I don’t understand the concepts. Does this stuff make sense to other people?
The heap is content-addressed over Λ₂₄: every value is mapped to a lattice point and canonicalized under the Conway group Co₀ (via libmmgroup), so the same content always lives at the same address.
What is ‘Λ₂₄’? What is a ‘lattice point’?
giving up the GC stopped being a renunciation, since cells are immutable and content-addressed, so there is nothing to trace and nothing to move
This kind of sounds like you’re saying that there’s nothing to free, which implies that nothing takes up memory, which I presume is not the case. Do you mean everything is immutable and content-addressed (like Git)? Doesn’t stuff still need to be freed somehow when the programs done with it, otherwise memory will grow for ever?
Agreed. Everything is a weird mixture of poetry and mathematics jargon. Basically every page of the book contains some esotericism which makes empty claims. It's completely divorced from reality.
Maybe I just don’t have the mathematics knowledge to understand it, but that doesn’t really tell me how you could represent one in memory, or use one as a backing store for a hash-addressed data structure.
The documentation is a work of art. Every time I try to work out what just one of the unexplained ideas is, it just introduces new unexplained ideas. I don't know where these ideas came from, how they fit together, or why putting them together is useful. I certainly don't know why I would want to write a program in this language, as opposed to any other language I already know.
Honestly, as someone who has at least a moderate tolerance for PL jargon, most of this is completely impenetrable. It's like someone put the whole field of PL in an LLM-powered blender.
You must not mix up technical mathematical words with softer prose words. For instance, "Yon's data model is categorical. A world is a category, a semantic site;"
So if you want to define a world, I expect you to tell me how to supply objects + morphisms + the composition law + the site structure. I don't know what a "semantic site" is, just what a "site" is. You'd need to define it. Anyway, we then get to our first examples of declaring worlds:
world Currency { Code is EUR, USD }
world Status { State is on, off }
This maybe gives me the first bit of data we need for a site. Definitely not the rest. Then we hit this
world Sub subset of Currency
Two issues with this. One is stylistic. Why on earth would you call it a "subset"? It's not a set! "subworld" is the obvious choice... But the real issue is that like the initial definition, this doesn't tell me how to build `Sub`. I need to know which objects and morphisms of Currency to include into the category Sub? What's the site structure?
So now I think, "OK, maybe you just declare part of the structure and fill it in later, before you actually use it..."
But then your example disproves that notion! You have
world Shop { Code is X }
place Account in Shop {
balance number
owner String
}
with no mention of Account when you declared Shop, I'm still not sure what Code or X are, and then you give what is seemingly supposed to be some working code
fun main(): number {
be a holds new Account { balance 40 owner "ada" }
be _p holds String.print(a.owner)
return a.balance + 2
}
So your motivating example really kills off the interest from your two main communities that would use this thing: 1) category theorists have no idea what you're talking about, because nothing here looks like categories - there are no morphisms, no site structure 2) computer/software folks look at your example and think "why on earth would I learn topos theory to do something that sure looks like OOP"
I think a "topos inspired programming language" would be kind of cool if you could pull it off, but I think you really need to figure out how to sell it in the docs to at least one of the two communities above.
Could you name a few languages you had in mind while developing this, their respective problems, and how your language improves them, feature by feature?
> Yon allocates into xleech2, a content-addressed heap whose geometry is the Leech lattice Λ24: exactly 196,560 slots per heap.
What is the computational complexity of memory allocation into this Leech lattice? What applications did you have in mind where making allocation a maths problem in order to save time on comparisons makes sense? What is going to happen when a program exhausts your little heap?
It's such a weird mixture of poetry and math that it's hard to tell what's going on. I suspect the author does not speak English as a first language (or at all?) and has used an LLM to generate this stuff.
I have trouble with the idea that these lattice structures could be less computationally complex or less likely to collide than a good simple hash table. I guess they could be more guaranteed to have stable access times?
The more I try to understand, the more it appears that they are a hash table (hash-addressed-structure to be pedantic), but with way more complicated backing than a hash table.
I'm not sure where or how to convey this, because I've seen several of these languages designed with AI, documentation created using AI, etc -- posted on Hacker News in the last months or so, and I've responded to each one with roughly the same feedback (and I'm assuming good faith: that the intent is that the poster wishes to grow as a language designer).
Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect. Otherwise, why should they give you the time of day? Why would you expect them to respond positively to effort alone when effort (in code and in shit prose) is extremely cheap right now? Their time is not cheap ...
When I read the documentation, and it is extremely clear that you haven't taken the time to clarify your ideas, when much of it is LLM prose, when much of the content introduces highfalutin ideas without motivation, blending categorical concepts (which, by the way, should never be mixed with vague prose claims about the language), violating my reader context model, preventing me from understanding what problem exactly your language design is solving (where is that problem stated clearly?), it is a waste of my time.
> The work took 3 weeks in total ... it's worth a look, and I hope it will win some converts, and that someone will want to help me with its development.
You've gone too fast, too much is vague, nothing is clear.
I'd delete everything, start over, and try and explain just one of the ideas clearly. Seriously. This sounds harsh, but it's honestly the correct approach to something as subtle and nuanced as programming language design.
> Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect.
I just want to amplify this point. As I was reading this, the LLMisms kept jumping out at me and each one felt like the author looking at me and deciding that my time spent reading this prose wasn't actually worth anything to them.
OP: I want YOUR thoughts, not the next token predictions of a gigantic pile of matrix multiplications. I want your awkward sentences, grammar mistakes, half-baked thoughts, self-doubt, silly jokes. I don't want this pile of grandiose mechanical slop completely devoid of humanity.
Just a comment: this sounds a lot like when someone I knew mildly succumbed to AI psychosis, and thought he, with Gemini, had made some physics/metaphysics breakthrough. If you’re losing sleep and feeling distressed or euphoric, maybe lay off for a few days, no matter how hard that is. Talk to friends and/or family about unimportant things. Get outside for a while. Go back to old hobbies (reading, hiking, just going to coffee shops or thrift stores - whatever) and then reassess.
This language looks interesting, but I don’t understand the concepts. Does this stuff make sense to other people?
The heap is content-addressed over Λ₂₄: every value is mapped to a lattice point and canonicalized under the Conway group Co₀ (via libmmgroup), so the same content always lives at the same address.
What is ‘Λ₂₄’? What is a ‘lattice point’?
giving up the GC stopped being a renunciation, since cells are immutable and content-addressed, so there is nothing to trace and nothing to move
This kind of sounds like you’re saying that there’s nothing to free, which implies that nothing takes up memory, which I presume is not the case. Do you mean everything is immutable and content-addressed (like Git)? Doesn’t stuff still need to be freed somehow when the programs done with it, otherwise memory will grow for ever?
Agreed. Everything is a weird mixture of poetry and mathematics jargon. Basically every page of the book contains some esotericism which makes empty claims. It's completely divorced from reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice
Maybe I just don’t have the mathematics knowledge to understand it, but that doesn’t really tell me how you could represent one in memory, or use one as a backing store for a hash-addressed data structure.
The documentation is a work of art. Every time I try to work out what just one of the unexplained ideas is, it just introduces new unexplained ideas. I don't know where these ideas came from, how they fit together, or why putting them together is useful. I certainly don't know why I would want to write a program in this language, as opposed to any other language I already know.
Sibling comment suggests maybe it’s AI psychosis and that would clarify a lot.
Honestly, as someone who has at least a moderate tolerance for PL jargon, most of this is completely impenetrable. It's like someone put the whole field of PL in an LLM-powered blender.
Advanced AI psychosis.
Professional help might be necessary.
> No garbage collector
> Slots are stable for the life of the process; the heap grows with distinct content only.
So how is a program supposed to handle lots of unique content? Like a web server handling user requests?
Taking it at face value, you'd spawn a subprocess to handle each web request and exit once it's done.
I apologize, you’re absolutely right!
I noticed since 5.5 GPT has been adding "lattice" to a lot of things. Not sure if it is the new Gremlins.
You must not mix up technical mathematical words with softer prose words. For instance, "Yon's data model is categorical. A world is a category, a semantic site;"
So if you want to define a world, I expect you to tell me how to supply objects + morphisms + the composition law + the site structure. I don't know what a "semantic site" is, just what a "site" is. You'd need to define it. Anyway, we then get to our first examples of declaring worlds:
This maybe gives me the first bit of data we need for a site. Definitely not the rest. Then we hit this Two issues with this. One is stylistic. Why on earth would you call it a "subset"? It's not a set! "subworld" is the obvious choice... But the real issue is that like the initial definition, this doesn't tell me how to build `Sub`. I need to know which objects and morphisms of Currency to include into the category Sub? What's the site structure?So now I think, "OK, maybe you just declare part of the structure and fill it in later, before you actually use it..."
But then your example disproves that notion! You have
with no mention of Account when you declared Shop, I'm still not sure what Code or X are, and then you give what is seemingly supposed to be some working code So your motivating example really kills off the interest from your two main communities that would use this thing: 1) category theorists have no idea what you're talking about, because nothing here looks like categories - there are no morphisms, no site structure 2) computer/software folks look at your example and think "why on earth would I learn topos theory to do something that sure looks like OOP"I think a "topos inspired programming language" would be kind of cool if you could pull it off, but I think you really need to figure out how to sell it in the docs to at least one of the two communities above.
Could you name a few languages you had in mind while developing this, their respective problems, and how your language improves them, feature by feature?
> Yon allocates into xleech2, a content-addressed heap whose geometry is the Leech lattice Λ24: exactly 196,560 slots per heap.
What is the computational complexity of memory allocation into this Leech lattice? What applications did you have in mind where making allocation a maths problem in order to save time on comparisons makes sense? What is going to happen when a program exhausts your little heap?
I found this page, https://yon-lang.org/book/coming-from
It's such a weird mixture of poetry and math that it's hard to tell what's going on. I suspect the author does not speak English as a first language (or at all?) and has used an LLM to generate this stuff.
I have trouble with the idea that these lattice structures could be less computationally complex or less likely to collide than a good simple hash table. I guess they could be more guaranteed to have stable access times?
The more I try to understand, the more it appears that they are a hash table (hash-addressed-structure to be pedantic), but with way more complicated backing than a hash table.
The buzzwords are strong in this one.