I would seriously consider toning down the marketing speak. This project is making very bold claims, without citations, while trying to appeal to an often skeptical crowd (developers).<p>"Graph databases are considered more powerful and modern than relational databases," ... okay? According to what benchmark and for what workloads? A statement like that is an immediate turnoff because it is dismissive of 30 years of database development.<p>"In many languages the slightest error in input data can cause a program to seriously malfunction. Beads has special rules of arithmetic and a robust mathematical model, that makes it extremely difficult to have a serious malfunction." I don't see how "special rules of arithmetic and a robust mathematical model" makes it "extremely difficult to have a serious malfunction."<p>Replacing "Unix, SQL, Rails, Ruby, RSpec, Templates, HTTP, HTML, CSS, DOM, jQuery and Javascript" in one language? How does this replace Unix? HTTP? It's not an operating system or a transport layer.<p>My goal isn't to crush someones idea, but consider your audience: developers.
It's very strange to me that the first pitch is that because desktops, laptops, and phones, are now all 64-bit, that is why we can now create a cross-platform language... that replaces scripting-ish languages.<p>I could understand if this was saying the 64-bit transition made things like Zig/Rust much simpler, but this seems like a non-sequitur for what Beads appears to be for.
- promises far fewer bugs<p>- promises to replace entire stack<p>- ...and Excel<p>- "declarative languages have almost no bugs"<p>- built-in database<p>Yeah color me skeptical. I love experiments, but I prefer those that under-promise and over-deliver. People have been promising unification languages since there were only two languages. People have been promising cross-platform since there were two platforms. And people have been promising to replace Excel since...Excel
This is their example of Fizzbuzz: <a href="https://github.com/magicmouse/beads-examples/blob/master/Example%20-%20FizzBuzz/fizzbuzz.beads" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/magicmouse/beads-examples/blob/master/Exa...</a><p>But this is supposed to replace Excel somehow? Along with basically every other language.<p>I can't accuse them of not being ambitious.
It's kind of reminiscent of 4GL languages (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...</a>). The idea was, too, to have bigger application-building blocks that are composed in a more declarative way.<p>I think this concept will be revisited from time to time in the future, although I agree with the skepticism about this particular project.
A lot of bold claims here. As someone who's worked on a lot of Excel business tools I can tell you there's no way something like this could replace anything in the companies I've worked for.
I think this project is really cool and am disappointed by so many of the negative sounding comments. They kind of remind me of the infamous Dropbox comment.<p>I think some healthy skepticism is fine but the mockery and out of hand dismissals seem like they should be beneath this crowd.
The marketing effort here feels so unbalanced. On the plus side, there's a marketing video with a professional sounding voiceover. But then there's a website titled "Beads Language Home Site", with a barebones design, and which talks repeatedly about "Macintosh" and "Windows OS".
This video gives more of a feel for the language.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/4WYxAfX_fTw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/4WYxAfX_fTw</a><p>It's definitely… interesting.
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll u̵s̵e̵ ̵r̵e̵g̵u̵l̵a̵r̵ ̵e̵x̵p̵r̵e̵s̵s̵i̵o̵n̵s̵ invent a new programming language that will unify everything.' Now they have two problems."
I don't have time to watch the video right now, but after skimming the language reference I get the impression that is is sort of a modern-ish take on the 4GLs from 80s/90s - not the sexiest thing but I feel like there's definitely room for something like this. Of course, the painful lesson of 4GLs was the consequences of vendor lock-in... I didn't see any links here to the sources.
I like it, but also recoil at the thought of using it. And I think that's a "professional programmer's instinct" talking, saying that I shouldn't settle for this one large dependency that boasts about being the future and has made room for so many little batteries-included features, I should be a big boy and use the most powerful library for every task...in JavaScript, a language that was, mind, designed in a few days and now has an ecosystem built on untrusted third-parties all depending on each other - a state of affairs that has already been demonstrated to fail.<p>If I were primarily an Excel user, then maybe it would work for me. Working with figures, converting between common units, generating reports and forms, and doing it in a form that acknowledges programming other than "ALGOL derivative"...There is a known niche. Maybe the author knows the niche better than I. There are good ideas here, ideas I want to steal. That is enough to recommend giving it a further look.
Not even looking at the way the language and tool chain works, the home page is very confusing, with each following paragraph making almost no connection to others. What's worse, the YouTube video makes is mostly based on a fairly convoluted argumentation that doesn't seem to be logical to me.<p>If the page is supposed to draw attention of any fairly technical folks, it definitely needs some more thorough reasoning and argumentation to do so.
Reminds me a bit of Rebol [1] and its close cousin Red [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_(programming_language)</a>
This is kind of a cool project, and I have no doubt it is a good language for the type of programming the author surely does.<p>However, the design of the language feels like it's a imperative language with a few a few additional features (declarative solver) bolted on to facilitate sub-problems within its use case: well within the paradigm, but lacking real coherent design, or an innovation that would merit non-trivial adoption.<p>That said, I would be interested at pursuing the source code: it's an interesting hobby language.
It looks like a functional(ish) reactive programming language, with an embedded database, and an SDK for compiling to JS and cross-platform binaries. Do I have that right?
A few months ago, I watched some videos by Brett Victor and decided I wanted to develop a visual programming language. That led me to <a href="https://futureofcoding.org/" rel="nofollow">https://futureofcoding.org/</a> and its slack channel.<p>There was some cool stuff happening on the server, and the admin was doing his best to elevate things, but that slack channel was also the last stop for some people before they descended into templeOS levels of madness.<p>Right around the time I was joining, the admin posted in the meta channel that, with a heavy heart, he had finally banned [the developer of beads, I feel weird calling him out by name]. Apparently he had been too argumentative and stubborn for the server to further tolerate.<p>It left a weird taste in my mouth about the future of coding slack channel. On one hand, you don't want toxic people in your community. On the other hand, the server was clearly a channel of last resort for a lot of people with a lot of crazy ideas. Kicking out one if its more prominent members to toil in solitude felt kind of gross.<p>Its interesting to see that, a few months after being banned, the beads project seems to be materializing.
This page seems to have a bit more info, but in general the whole site seems light on details and heavy on promises: <a href="https://beadslang.org/" rel="nofollow">https://beadslang.org/</a>
I did not love reading the code examples. Call me a lightweight, but I think Swift and Kotlin have a pretty good balance between being verbose enough to read easily, and expressive enough to not need a ton of code. This syntax feels like a step backwards.
I like this, the constructs in the ref card look really powerful, it looks like a batteries included language. Downloading it now to take it for a spin.<p>Edit: Nevermind Beads only works on Windows and Mac, It needs Wine to work on Linux.
LinkedIn page of the creator: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-de-jong-6a15086/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-de-jong-6a15086/</a>
I find it amusing how the top item of the stack "to be replaced" says "Unix", but then further down the page it notes that there is no version for Linux at this time.
I don't get it. The pitch is about... 64bits? I've been writing cross platform 64bit software for years, why would I need a new programming language for that? What a strange thing to lead with.<p>The home page doesn't do a good job at explaining what its about and why I should care. I then looked at the sample code and I still don't think I get it.<p>> The next generation of languages is now possible: Declarative languages,<p>Ok, but declarative languages have existed for a looong time too.
Not really a technical comment but this is the first time I've seen language syntax written down with graphs in documentation. I honestly would've preferred text but it is interesting. What tool did you generate them with?
This seems like a mildly interesting project targeting visual displays type niche (is it something similar to the processing language? E.g. a language for making visualizations of data?)<p>Afaict its features are:<p>* a string matching DSL that the author thinks is more readable than regex (but what isn't more readable?)<p>* a very basic graph db<p>* a syntax that's more Algol like than c (matter of personal taste i guess)<p>*a declarative layout engine with strong reactivity support<p>*combining both the server and client side in one lang.<p>* support for a time travelling debugger<p>But its totally overshadowed by the utterly bizarre or dare I say "batshit", marketing material.
The "64bit" video and stack of books replaced by a single component made the impression that this must be satire. I didn't look further because of that.
It seems that after years of trying to develop programming languages and architectures to have separation of concerns, with the business logic, the presentation logic, and the data storage separated (or even going to full-blown microservices), this just... bunches everything together?<p>I get the appeal for a small program that fits in your head, but for anything more complex I don't want the code to take care of everything in a single module/file.
Looking at the code examples I fail to see how this is a fundamental change from other full stack languages such as JavaScript, rust, C, C++, Nim.... The list goes on.<p>Not that that is a bad thing! I'm happy your working on it, but I don't think they or this will replace excel like tools until everyone decides to learn how to program instead of using an easy and familiar path.
This reads like a marketing webpage and is not technically coherent. What is the purpose that this langauge is intending to solve?<p>I used to program in a declarative langauge a few decades ago, Prolog. Heck, even makefiles are declarative. Declarative programming isn't guaranteed to be bug-free in the way the page indicates.
It looks interesting. The reference card immediately made me think of the J vocab reference card (the old one, not the Nuvoc one!). I do like the declarative nature of beads, and it does remind me of Red or Rebol in a way as someone has already commented here.
their loop syntax looks a bit crazy... [0].<p>[0] <a href="http://www.beadslang.com/downloads/refcard.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.beadslang.com/downloads/refcard.pdf</a>
Is there a good tool in the same space? I'd love to have something _simple_ to develop quick-and-dirty desktop applications.<p>RN does not qualify as "simple".