47 ms·

EYG: A Programming Language for Humans

87 points by crowdhailer 2mo ago

prologic 2mo ago
Functional programming paradigms? Matching? Complex syntax? Sorry but either I've missed the point, or you've lost me. If we're trying to create tools for non-Developers to build software, this isn't it. You can pretty much already just ask Claude/Codex/whatever and it'll build you a thing™ and it'll probably work. You don't even need to read the code.
- sodapopcan 2mo ago
  I have to admit, it's kinda nice to read a comment that's simply complaining about programming language design again. For a second I thought there wasn't even going to be mention of AI, but alas...
- zem 2mo ago
  I would say that if you get the syntax and docs right functional programming paradigms and matching can be very intuitive for non programmers. you don't have to build up a mental model of variables versus objects and passing by value or reference.
- pasquinelli 2mo ago
  from the article > My hypothesis > Developers deal with two broad categories of work. > - Describing the logic of the problem they are solving using language constructs like if, loop, var etc. > - Working with computers to run those problems using constucts like $PATH, /var/tmp and AWS. > There are a lot of humans who can do the first work fine but don’t have the time to master the second category. I call these humans “makers”. the idea seems to be to make an end-user programming language for makers. makers want to make not ask ai to make, and they are capable of writing code, actually, it's just all the computer plumbing that's too much of a pain. a sophisticated programming language to write personal software that cuts out the computer plumbing would be something i'd love. i'm not fully clear how that would be done, but i like the thought.
  - tolciho 2mo ago
    AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.
    - pjmlp 2mo ago
      Nowadays it would be coupled with a LLM and be much flexible in what it could accept as English sentences.
  - Brian_K_White 2mo ago
    500 million years ago a former colleague created "Electric File Clerk" which became profile which became filepro which technically still exists today. It was a "RAD, rapid application development system basically the proto ms access. The idea was the user is a dentist or lawyer, not a developer, but needs to make their own software because at that time almost no canned software existed yet. The doctor or florist or whatever could make their own database-backed application without writing a line of code. Just draw screens and define screens and fields and report formats. No language at all, since no code. We are talking trs-80 model I here...
    - EvanAnderson 2mo ago
      Aside: I support a court who uses a FilePro-based application that dates back, at least, to the mid-90s. I don't have to deal with the actual app-- just the underlying Linux boxes that run it. It seems reasonable.
      - Brian_K_White 2mo ago
        In the filepro circles there is a famouse bit of history about a large user that once tried to migrate off of it, because obviously it's crap because it's ancient... and paid some shop to rewrite their existing filepro app in some current db framework, I think an oracle product but I don't remember, and they consumed some large amount of money and years, and in the end failed. The client sued the consultants and it actually went to trial and the lead developer of filepro at the time was called to testify as part of the whole thing. Point was just, this old thing is certainly old and not exactly natural to integrate with anything else today, but, there must be something there such that it does the job people actually need doing, and even spending millions of $ and many man-years on the most bestest-currentest-modernest-kool-kidsest systems somehow fails to deliver a equivalent actual real world functionality the users already had, let alone better. As magical as new frameworks undeniably are, there's always just something a bit out of touch, like they make the most sense to the developer of the framework and not the user of the framework.
- nine_k 2mo ago
  Millions of people learn and practice functional reactive programming every day, without considering themselves software developers. They just use spreadsheets. Many of the lofty sounding concepts of programming were invented to make things simpler. Show them from a right aspect, and they are quite approachable to a non-engineer.
- crabbone 2mo ago
  Surprisingly, I've met non-programmers who easily learned languages considered "strange" or difficult to understand by professional programmers (Forth is even somewhat popular among astronomers, but I've also met people using Prolog for their programming needs, even J). I've worked quite a bit with scientists who mostly use Python for their programming-related tasks. To me, it seems that the reason to work with Python has very little to do with the qualities of the language, rather the tools and the community around it. There's nothing specially intuitive or helpful about Python when it comes to doing scientific stuff, not anymore than, say, in PHP or Lua etc. languages from the same general category (which we don't see used in the same setting). It's the libraries / tools like NumPy and Jupyter that make the difference. From just looking at EYG, I can't tell if it's a good match for the problem or not. But, really, the language design doesn't seem to play an important role in this context. If it somehow manages to win popularity among the people it's trying to engage -- great! But, unless one has an army of "evangelists" and the marketing budget rivaling GDPs of smaller countries, the success seem to be completely random and unpredictable (with quite low success rate).
invalidOrTaken 2mo ago
Interesting stuff. I do like the taxonomy of "computer work", where it's one part logic cognition, and one part ticky-tack details.
- crowdhailer 2mo ago
  I believe this was a separation that existed in the role of programmer (logic cognition) from coder (details) in the early days of computing. I previously read a good post about this but can't find it now.
z0ltan 2mo ago
[dead]
desireco42 2mo ago
Ha, very interesting. I just started using Gleam last week or so... I knew about it and loved Elm back in the day. Anyhow, will enjoy discovering EYG as well.
- desireco42 2mo ago
  So I poked around... this is really interesting. So you take language in text and make IR, but also could be made IR directly. That is very interesting. Potentially I could make a version without curly braces or some weird syntax and it could be compiled in IR and still be same language :). Kind of like MS and VB and C# haha. I like what you did so far, I will keep an eye, maybe help if I can.
  - crowdhailer 2mo ago
    I have a few weird syntax I've worked on in the past so this is definitely possible. Currently only the textual representation and structural editor are in the repo. The most different I have done is a layout where the AST was presented like a file tree. apply ├── int_negate └── 5
    - conartist6 2mo ago
      What if you just put the file tree in the AST... and hashed it all? https://gist.github.com/conartist6/7dd40697140965ee343de93b9a47eabc https://gist.github.com/conartist6/7dd40697140965ee343de93b9...
    - desireco42 2mo ago
      I think you created a potential platform for experiments with different language syntax ideas. It is rarely that people want to change how integers are represented and such, mostly it is syntax. So this lets me and others try things out.
- nylonstrung 2mo ago
  https://www.roc-lang.org/ https://www.roc-lang.org/ is worth checking out if you are interested in a modern Elm-inspired lang
ctkqiang96 2mo ago
interesting......
saghm 2mo ago
> Sympathy for the machine only exists in developers. They will happily explain why integer overflows need to happen. The average human response to integer overflows is “WTF, that’s not how numbers work”. We have BigInt and 99% of the time the WTF response is the correct one. Forget sympathy for the machine; the real reason we need programming languages that prevent issues because we should have sympathy for the poor humans who are incapable of reasoning about anything but the simplest code without hitting the limits of their hardware. I'd argue that for virtually all humans (whether developers or otherwise), the brain is like the world's worst runtime for code imaginable. The maximum memory is absurdly low (how many variables can you really remember at once?) and prone to corruption that makes C look like a heaven-sent solution to undefined behavior (how many parents of multiple children do you know who never accidentally call kids the wrong name? my average length between calling one of my cats by the name of the other is like, a day at most), and the speed is laughable (time for a single division operation is on the order of entire seconds). The widest integers in the world will not stop us from writing buggy code, and I think we have bigger fish to fry than BigInts
- pmontra 2mo ago
  About your question > how many variables can you really remember at once? and our brain being a bad runtime for programming: I started programming on a Sinclair ZX81 with 1 kB of RAM. I wrote my program on paper, reasoned about it by tracing variables on paper and eventually I typed in the program on the keyboard and run it. That was much better than typing line numbers and BASIC commands directly into the REPL. Of course I had bugs and the actual values of those variables surprised me. They still do but I have a much wider view on the software now, usually a couple of 100x50 columns of code side by side. The ability to follow the values is not much better, but values are seldom the important matter, at least in web development, backend and frontend. It's more about the control flow and the data structure. That's more similar to the organizational issues of many other human activities. This goes there, that goes into that other place. My old 1 kB computer programs had little space for organization.
  - saghm 2mo ago
    I'd argue that using a pencil and paper (which is a totally reasonable thing!) is not really your memory at that point. Augmenting our hardware with peripherals is a useful technique, but it doesn't fundamentally change the constraints; like in "regular" hardware, you're now paying even more per cycle with the equivalent to looking up on an external disk.
veqq 2mo ago
EYG's structure editor is amazing, not letting you create syntactically invalid code etc.
- crowdhailer 2mo ago
  Thank you. I have some new editor features I hope to share once the package management is improved.
Panzerschrek 2mo ago
I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something else. We have a lot of examples for this, like COBOL, SQL, Visual Basic.
- viceconsole 2mo ago
  Your three examples historically were successful in achieving widespread usage, and in the case of SQL, shows no sign of disappearing.
  - Panzerschrek 2mo ago
    They are widespread, but not among "normies", but professional programmers. That's what I call a failure, since they were initially designed to be used by non-programmers.
    - himata4113 2mo ago
      I would love having the capability of just writing json-esque SQL that has the most basic type checks, alas we live in purgatory with weird build systems to validate queries.
      - bazoom42 2mo ago
        What is json-esque SQL?
    - crowdhailer 2mo ago
      I'm not sure "normies" is the right grouping. I think that is too broad some people are artists and some people just aren't that curious to try. I think a better group to target is "makers" I think that's anyone with enough ambition to at least try and fix a plug or change a lightbulb.
gulugawa 2mo ago
Good luck. I look forward to hearing about future progress. I strongly agree with the approach of making programming more accessible with a simple, deterministic feature set.
teo_zero 2mo ago
I thought "makers" all used Python. What's the friction that EYG is supposed to remove?
- crowdhailer 2mo ago
  Bringing a sound and totally inferred type system, including of all effects. Is the main dimension. It also aims to improve the friction around managing dependencies.
v3ss0n 2mo ago
why this why we have llms? thats totally usless. I think all new programming langugaes are ueless right now with advancement of LLMs.
- ModernMech 2mo ago
  I don't understand your reasoning; LLMs and programming languages are different things. Like humans, LLMs use programming languages as tools, so the existence of LLMs doesn't obviate programming languages.
Alisaqqt 2mo ago
This is cool. I'll give it a try
oceanician 2mo ago
I wonder what you think of Gherkin/Cucumber? https://cucumber.io https://cucumber.io "Cucumber lets you write automated tests in plain language." I wonder if has been integrated with ClaudeCode yet?
sebastianconcpt 2mo ago
It already exits, it's English to prompt AIs to implement the details.

87 points by crowdhailer 2mo ago

Functional programming paradigms? Matching? Complex syntax? Sorry but either I've missed the point, or you've lost me. If we're trying to create tools for non-Developers to build software, this isn't it. You can pretty much already just ask Claude/Codex/whatever and it'll build you a thing™ and it'll probably work. You don't even need to read the code.

sodapopcan 2mo ago
I have to admit, it's kinda nice to read a comment that's simply complaining about programming language design again. For a second I thought there wasn't even going to be mention of AI, but alas...
zem 2mo ago
I would say that if you get the syntax and docs right functional programming paradigms and matching can be very intuitive for non programmers. you don't have to build up a mental model of variables versus objects and passing by value or reference.
pasquinelli 2mo ago
from the article > My hypothesis > Developers deal with two broad categories of work. > - Describing the logic of the problem they are solving using language constructs like if, loop, var etc. > - Working with computers to run those problems using constucts like $PATH, /var/tmp and AWS. > There are a lot of humans who can do the first work fine but don’t have the time to master the second category. I call these humans “makers”. the idea seems to be to make an end-user programming language for makers. makers want to make not ask ai to make, and they are capable of writing code, actually, it's just all the computer plumbing that's too much of a pain. a sophisticated programming language to write personal software that cuts out the computer plumbing would be something i'd love. i'm not fully clear how that would be done, but i like the thought.
- tolciho 2mo ago
  AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.
  - pjmlp 2mo ago
    Nowadays it would be coupled with a LLM and be much flexible in what it could accept as English sentences.
- Brian_K_White 2mo ago
  500 million years ago a former colleague created "Electric File Clerk" which became profile which became filepro which technically still exists today. It was a "RAD, rapid application development system basically the proto ms access. The idea was the user is a dentist or lawyer, not a developer, but needs to make their own software because at that time almost no canned software existed yet. The doctor or florist or whatever could make their own database-backed application without writing a line of code. Just draw screens and define screens and fields and report formats. No language at all, since no code. We are talking trs-80 model I here...
  - EvanAnderson 2mo ago
    Aside: I support a court who uses a FilePro-based application that dates back, at least, to the mid-90s. I don't have to deal with the actual app-- just the underlying Linux boxes that run it. It seems reasonable.
    - Brian_K_White 2mo ago
      In the filepro circles there is a famouse bit of history about a large user that once tried to migrate off of it, because obviously it's crap because it's ancient... and paid some shop to rewrite their existing filepro app in some current db framework, I think an oracle product but I don't remember, and they consumed some large amount of money and years, and in the end failed. The client sued the consultants and it actually went to trial and the lead developer of filepro at the time was called to testify as part of the whole thing. Point was just, this old thing is certainly old and not exactly natural to integrate with anything else today, but, there must be something there such that it does the job people actually need doing, and even spending millions of $ and many man-years on the most bestest-currentest-modernest-kool-kidsest systems somehow fails to deliver a equivalent actual real world functionality the users already had, let alone better. As magical as new frameworks undeniably are, there's always just something a bit out of touch, like they make the most sense to the developer of the framework and not the user of the framework.
nine_k 2mo ago
Millions of people learn and practice functional reactive programming every day, without considering themselves software developers. They just use spreadsheets. Many of the lofty sounding concepts of programming were invented to make things simpler. Show them from a right aspect, and they are quite approachable to a non-engineer.
crabbone 2mo ago
Surprisingly, I've met non-programmers who easily learned languages considered "strange" or difficult to understand by professional programmers (Forth is even somewhat popular among astronomers, but I've also met people using Prolog for their programming needs, even J). I've worked quite a bit with scientists who mostly use Python for their programming-related tasks. To me, it seems that the reason to work with Python has very little to do with the qualities of the language, rather the tools and the community around it. There's nothing specially intuitive or helpful about Python when it comes to doing scientific stuff, not anymore than, say, in PHP or Lua etc. languages from the same general category (which we don't see used in the same setting). It's the libraries / tools like NumPy and Jupyter that make the difference. From just looking at EYG, I can't tell if it's a good match for the problem or not. But, really, the language design doesn't seem to play an important role in this context. If it somehow manages to win popularity among the people it's trying to engage -- great! But, unless one has an army of "evangelists" and the marketing budget rivaling GDPs of smaller countries, the success seem to be completely random and unpredictable (with quite low success rate).

invalidOrTaken 2mo ago

Interesting stuff. I do like the taxonomy of "computer work", where it's one part logic cognition, and one part ticky-tack details.

crowdhailer 2mo ago
I believe this was a separation that existed in the role of programmer (logic cognition) from coder (details) in the early days of computing. I previously read a good post about this but can't find it now.

z0ltan 2mo ago

[dead]

desireco42 2mo ago

Ha, very interesting. I just started using Gleam last week or so... I knew about it and loved Elm back in the day. Anyhow, will enjoy discovering EYG as well.

desireco42 2mo ago
So I poked around... this is really interesting. So you take language in text and make IR, but also could be made IR directly. That is very interesting. Potentially I could make a version without curly braces or some weird syntax and it could be compiled in IR and still be same language :). Kind of like MS and VB and C# haha. I like what you did so far, I will keep an eye, maybe help if I can.
- crowdhailer 2mo ago
  I have a few weird syntax I've worked on in the past so this is definitely possible. Currently only the textual representation and structural editor are in the repo. The most different I have done is a layout where the AST was presented like a file tree. apply ├── int_negate └── 5
  - conartist6 2mo ago
    What if you just put the file tree in the AST... and hashed it all? https://gist.github.com/conartist6/7dd40697140965ee343de93b9a47eabc https://gist.github.com/conartist6/7dd40697140965ee343de93b9...
  - desireco42 2mo ago
    I think you created a potential platform for experiments with different language syntax ideas. It is rarely that people want to change how integers are represented and such, mostly it is syntax. So this lets me and others try things out.
nylonstrung 2mo ago
https://www.roc-lang.org/ https://www.roc-lang.org/ is worth checking out if you are interested in a modern Elm-inspired lang

ctkqiang96 2mo ago

interesting......

saghm 2mo ago

> Sympathy for the machine only exists in developers. They will happily explain why integer overflows need to happen. The average human response to integer overflows is “WTF, that’s not how numbers work”. We have BigInt and 99% of the time the WTF response is the correct one. Forget sympathy for the machine; the real reason we need programming languages that prevent issues because we should have sympathy for the poor humans who are incapable of reasoning about anything but the simplest code without hitting the limits of their hardware. I'd argue that for virtually all humans (whether developers or otherwise), the brain is like the world's worst runtime for code imaginable. The maximum memory is absurdly low (how many variables can you really remember at once?) and prone to corruption that makes C look like a heaven-sent solution to undefined behavior (how many parents of multiple children do you know who never accidentally call kids the wrong name? my average length between calling one of my cats by the name of the other is like, a day at most), and the speed is laughable (time for a single division operation is on the order of entire seconds). The widest integers in the world will not stop us from writing buggy code, and I think we have bigger fish to fry than BigInts

pmontra 2mo ago
About your question > how many variables can you really remember at once? and our brain being a bad runtime for programming: I started programming on a Sinclair ZX81 with 1 kB of RAM. I wrote my program on paper, reasoned about it by tracing variables on paper and eventually I typed in the program on the keyboard and run it. That was much better than typing line numbers and BASIC commands directly into the REPL. Of course I had bugs and the actual values of those variables surprised me. They still do but I have a much wider view on the software now, usually a couple of 100x50 columns of code side by side. The ability to follow the values is not much better, but values are seldom the important matter, at least in web development, backend and frontend. It's more about the control flow and the data structure. That's more similar to the organizational issues of many other human activities. This goes there, that goes into that other place. My old 1 kB computer programs had little space for organization.
- saghm 2mo ago
  I'd argue that using a pencil and paper (which is a totally reasonable thing!) is not really your memory at that point. Augmenting our hardware with peripherals is a useful technique, but it doesn't fundamentally change the constraints; like in "regular" hardware, you're now paying even more per cycle with the equivalent to looking up on an external disk.

veqq 2mo ago

EYG's structure editor is amazing, not letting you create syntactically invalid code etc.

crowdhailer 2mo ago
Thank you. I have some new editor features I hope to share once the package management is improved.

Panzerschrek 2mo ago

I generally don't think it's a good idea to develop a language for non-developers. It was tried before multiple times and the end goal has not been achieved. Sooner or later one realizes, that professional developers are still necessary, even for languages initially designed for "normies". But such a language is typically not good enough for them, it lacks necessary abstractions, flexibility, performance or something else. We have a lot of examples for this, like COBOL, SQL, Visual Basic.

viceconsole 2mo ago
Your three examples historically were successful in achieving widespread usage, and in the case of SQL, shows no sign of disappearing.
- Panzerschrek 2mo ago
  They are widespread, but not among "normies", but professional programmers. That's what I call a failure, since they were initially designed to be used by non-programmers.
  - himata4113 2mo ago
    I would love having the capability of just writing json-esque SQL that has the most basic type checks, alas we live in purgatory with weird build systems to validate queries.
    - bazoom42 2mo ago
      What is json-esque SQL?
  - crowdhailer 2mo ago
    I'm not sure "normies" is the right grouping. I think that is too broad some people are artists and some people just aren't that curious to try. I think a better group to target is "makers" I think that's anyone with enough ambition to at least try and fix a plug or change a lightbulb.

gulugawa 2mo ago

Good luck. I look forward to hearing about future progress. I strongly agree with the approach of making programming more accessible with a simple, deterministic feature set.

teo_zero 2mo ago

I thought "makers" all used Python. What's the friction that EYG is supposed to remove?

crowdhailer 2mo ago
Bringing a sound and totally inferred type system, including of all effects. Is the main dimension. It also aims to improve the friction around managing dependencies.

v3ss0n 2mo ago

why this why we have llms? thats totally usless. I think all new programming langugaes are ueless right now with advancement of LLMs.

ModernMech 2mo ago
I don't understand your reasoning; LLMs and programming languages are different things. Like humans, LLMs use programming languages as tools, so the existence of LLMs doesn't obviate programming languages.

Alisaqqt 2mo ago

This is cool. I'll give it a try

oceanician 2mo ago

I wonder what you think of Gherkin/Cucumber? https://cucumber.io https://cucumber.io "Cucumber lets you write automated tests in plain language." I wonder if has been integrated with ClaudeCode yet?

sebastianconcpt 2mo ago

It already exits, it's English to prompt AIs to implement the details.