Hello, this is Coding Fiend from Oakland, CA

Introduction
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Dear Strumenta, I would like the opportunity to introduce myself. I am Edward de Jong, a long-time programmer, who started with punchcards on an IBM 1620 that did a whopping 100 instructions per second, and was lucky enough to get a pass to JPL in Pasadena, to use their Univac 1108 system, a very deluxe computer at the time.

Programming languages are a passion of mine, and have been developing for the last 4 years a replacement for the main general purpose languages such as JS, Python, C++ and Java. As you can imagine this very modest goal has no major obstacles, and progress is smooth and uninterrupted. ;-> Anyway getting very close to 1.0 release, and looking for willing subjects.

I look forward to hearing suggestions and critiques from this learned audience. The language is posted at www.beadslang.com.

7 Likes
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Can I ask you what motivated you in getting this project started?
Is the language open-source?

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I was a long time user of Modula-2, which Prof. Wirth’s sequel to Pascal. I was one of the few renegades in the USA who built big commercial products using M2, while everyone else was drinking MS’ Kool-Aid and using C. But Modula-2 although still a great

systems programming language is not really attuned to the graphical interactive world we live in, so i looked around for a suitably elegant replacement but could not find anything with the properties of simplicity and robustness that was so elegantly expressed in M2. M2 had a user manual of 100 pages, and has so many typing checks and runtime checks of various kinds that it is still ahead of most languages today, even though it came out in 1984.

I admired how Python grew in popularity organically over the last 25 years, and adopting the significant whitespace trick of Python,

tried to bring forward the principles of Prof. Wirth into the next generation of environments, namely graphical interactive software in its many forms.

Another part of my motivation, was i wrote about 100 iphone titles in ObjectiveC, and then had Apple kick them all out of the store because the platform had changed so much, along with the devices themselves, the software was hard coded to Apple’s screen

sizes. I was also frustrated with the erosion of my prior products as well (word processors, desktop publishing, painting program for kids, label design software) only a few of which still run in Windows, and just one on Mac, that i resolved to build a notation that would allow software to run for 100 years without breaking.

So started to build a programming language that would be more virtual, and less tied to current hardware and operating systems. I also was dismayed that the #1 development platform by many measures is the Web, and that involves at present an ungodly collection of languages (HTML, CSS, JS) and even more horrible frameworks and external tools. I don’t want a terminal-based system like so many languages are, I want graphical interaction with bitmaps, sounds, movies, some animation, but i don’t software to be like a sand castle at the beach, which they are to a great extent today.

I would like to recreate that atmosphere, when Pascal and Basic were around, and you could build products in a single language and have them work all over the place. So my goal is to be able to generate websites, web apps, mobile apps, all from a single clean notation that has the fewest dependencies possible.

As for the disposition of the project, as it is before 1.0, i cannot predict where and how it will end up at present. I had originally thought open source would be the way, but encouraging fierce apathy from both academic and hobbyists, so not sure what is the best home for this project. It has far too much invested in it, and works too well for it to languish in obscurity.

Sorry for the longwinded explanation, i don’t have time to make it shorter.

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ha, interesting. Since you like Wirth languages, you may want to take a peek at Nim. Syntax-wide is Python-like, but if you look closer, it takes quite a few hints from Pascal, Ada and Modula

oh, look now they even say it explicitly on their homepage

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Nim reminds me very strongly of Modula-2, which i used for a long time and made many wonderful large programs in. Nim has some updated features which make it more suitable for today’s work. Interesting that they compile to several other languages. I guess for integration with larger projects not written in Nim. It is a fairly low level language, like Modula-2, and i think the use case for low level languages is diminishing greatly, as most people are concerned with 1) how quickly can you get a project done, 2) how reliable is the resulting product. #1 is not accelerated by having to determine if you should store 2, 4, or 8 bytes per number. This is why Python is so strong today; it glosses over the fine details which were so important in the early resource constrained days.