What does HackerNews think of dex-lang?

The lack of an AD primitive is something I've discussed with the creator of BQN, coming from a JAX world I really miss it and feel that it's such an obvious feature, especially in a language which has a way to turn a tacit function into its AST[1], which has been used for symbolic differentiation[2]. Going from symbolic to reverse-mode AD is not much of a leap and users can define their own primitives with ReBQN[3].

I see what you mean by obfuscation, but I think that it's one of those things that feels really hard and stupid until you start being able to do it really quickly. When you learn a foreign language, you first read letters, then words, then sentences because you become accustomed to larger pieces of the language that you can predict what's coming next without reading it. A similar sort of thing happens with APL/BQN, you read letters (primitives), then you begin to recognise words (small, commonly used groups of primitives), then you see larger patterns which look like magical incantations to an inexperienced user.

These "words" are (typically) tacit phrases, many of them only existing due to specific primitives like swap. Once I used BQN to golf, I started wishing Julia had a swap for operators i.e.

  -(3, 5) = -2
  swap(-)(3, 5) = 2

I won't defend these languages to the death, but they are fun to puzzle your brain with in codegolf. Maybe Dex[4] will go somewhere too.

[1]: https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/spec/system.html#operation-p...

[2]: https://saltysylvi.github.io/blog/bqn-macros.html

[3]: https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/rebqn.html

[4]: https://github.com/google-research/dex-lang

I can think of a few others…

Sawzall, a language focused around processing logs. Rob Pike led on this but use has pretty much all been replaced by Go. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawzall_(programming_languag...

Dex, a language focused around array processing from the team behind the Jax machine learning library. Early stage research project. https://github.com/google-research/dex-lang

Rune, a language focused on security, early stage research project. https://github.com/google/rune

Wuffs, a language focused on writing safe file format handlers (parsing, encoding, decoding) https://github.com/google/wuffs

You might like dex[1].

[1]: https://github.com/google-research/dex-lang

Google is hugely invested into Python, especially the data engineering branch. TensorFlow, Jax, etc. Though they will probably get replaced by Dex lang, they even dropped Swift 4 Tensorflow to focus on Dex [1]. The language looks very Pythonic compared to Julia which is a 180-degree turn in terms of language design.

[1] https://github.com/google-research/dex-lang

Not that it has bindings to other tools, but it sounds like Dex[1] would be relevant to your interests!

[1]: https://github.com/google-research/dex-lang

There are a few efforts working in this space. As you can imagine, all of them are experimental:

- Dex: https://github.com/google-research/dex-lang/ - Hasktorch: https://github.com/hasktorch/hasktorch - This initiative from the Python Typing-sig: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oaG0V2ZE5BRDjd9N-Tr1N0IK...