Stanford Online
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2022
1:04:45 · 14K views · Nov 16, 2017
Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.
HN recommends it as the best talk on concatenative languages and their mathematical properties.
4 comments from Hacker News
I didn't see it linked from the article, Jon Purdy has a great talk about this too: "Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal" (2017) this video There's also "A Conversation with Manfred von Thun" [LINK] which is worth reading (IMO) if you're interested in concatenative languages. He's the creator of Joy. I've been working with Joy over the last few years now and I really think there's something there. It seems to combine the best features of both Forth and Lisp.
Hear, hear! Wise words from the genius who created Turing Drawings. It's becoming more and more important to treat complexity as a kind of technical debt that has the potential at any moment to metastasize into eldritch horror. I've been playing with what you could call a minimalist programming language: Joy created by Manfred von Thun (who was a philosophy professor! See "A Conversation with Manfred von Thun" [LINK] ) It combines features of Lisp and Forth, and I suspect it may be the simplest useful language. The syntax is enormously simple, and the semantics are likewise simple. It's easy to reason about functions and derive them in a mathematical way using simple algebra, so it's hard to introduce bugs. I recently found a very good 2017 talk by Jon Purdy describing concatinative programming and it's quirks and (potential) advantages: Stanford Seminar - "Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal" this video Anyway, it's made me "allergic" to complexity. I tried Rust. Wrote the beginning of a Joy interpreter. I paused for a month and came back to it and it had become Greek to me, and I can't read Greek. :( Now part of that is just I 'm getting old, but a lot of it is the complexity of Rust. I don't want to pick on Rust though, complexity itself is the enemy (Rust is, if anything, an improvement on most of what has come before it, eh? I think only Ada can really be said to be Rust's peer?)
I don't know if it's Baader-Meinhof or what, but I'm seeing concatenative languages all over the place now. Which is great, because now I'm planning to write my own! My gut says that a concatenative language could be ideal for competitive programming, where you want to quickly apply various transformations to your input and immediately see the result. Here's a talk I watched recently describing some of the neat mathematical properties of concatenative languages: this video
It comes from Linear Logic, where there's no inference A&B->A. I think the point of the name is "there's always progress". This talk explains some other origins as well as the connections between different logics to different type systems (though the focus is on stack languages) this video