Emerging Languages Camp Part 1: Introduction and Gershwin

Emerging Languages Camp is an all day event held before Strange Loop. There were 11 presentations on new and unusual programming languages in varying stages of development.

Production-ready languages like C#, Ruby, Clojure, and Haskell don't just spring to life out of nothing. There exists a historical context of major language families (Algol, LISP, ML, etc.) as well as a "primordial soup" of amateur, research, and proof-of-concept experiments which allow for features well outside the patterns found in mainstream programming languages.

As new problems in computing arise, new languages are being created to help tackle those problems. Emerging Languages Camp brings together programming language creators, researchers, and enthusiasts annually to share their work and ideas.

Our goal is advancing the state of the art in programming language design and implementation by fostering collaboration between academics, industry practitioners, and hobbyists.

What follows are my notes from the 2013 ELC, with links to the presentations and slides. There's way too much material here for a single post, so I'll break this up over several days. I hope that these notes encourage you to watch some of the presentations and possibly attend a future ELC!

Gershwin: Stack-based Concatenative Clojure

Dan Gregoire

Homepage · Presentation · Slides

I found this presentation interesting because the author was able to essentially host a completely different language on top of Clojure with very few changes to the language syntax or parsing. Clojure is a LISP, whereas Gershwin is a concatenative language like FORTH or Factor. Syntactically, they have little in common. However, you can easily use both Clojure and Gershwin code in the same file or even within the same line of code. You simply omit the outer parentheses when writing Gershwin code. In this way, use of () provides a kind of "Clojure interop" for Gershwin code. Gershwin adds very little new syntax. The major additions are:

: name ;; defines a word -- "word" is Gershwin-speak for function

#[ body ] ;; anonymous function

Here are some simple examples:

2 2 +   ;; 4

: foo { :foo "bar" } get

;; "bar"

: times-2 [n--n] 2 * .  ;; Here, [n--n] is the "stack effect." This means "pop n from the stack, then put n back onto the stack." Required for function declarations

4 times-2 ;; 8

[ 1 2 3] #[2 *] map  ;; [2 4 6]

Dan talked about the implementation of the compiler. Again, I was impressed at have few changes were required versus "stock" Clojure. The compiler takes on extra argument, a flag indicating whether or not Gershwin should be enabled.

Why is this useful? Mostly, the advantages and disadvantages are similar to other stack-based, concatenative programming languages. You can produce amazingly succinct, elegant code. This requires "vigorous factoring." However, the succinctness can turn into opacity if taken "too far." It can be difficult for programmers reading stack-based code to keep track of the stack, which is not visible in the code itself (although it is visible in the REPL). This is particularly true if the code does a lot of stack manipulation. Then said that if you feel the need for stack manipulation, you should probably read that as a need for factoring your code. Gershwin also offers dataflow combinatorial for higher-order stack manipulation. These are essentially copied from Factor.

Dan said that Gershwin might be a good fit for your code if you find yourself using a lot of arrows ( -> ) in your Clojure.

Dan is an entertaining speaker who maintained a fast but easily understandable pace.

In the next post, I'll discuss the presentations on Daimio and Babel.