| ▲ | Lily Programming Language(lily-lang.org) |
| 59 points by FascinatedBox 4 days ago | 40 comments |
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| ▲ | oneseven 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| What I really want to see from a "*-programming-language" post on HN is _why_. Why Lily? |
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| ▲ | keychera 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I am curious as well. some past readme has Why sections and I am not sure why they are removed/changed this have "Why" section
https://gitlab.com/FascinatedBox/lily/-/blob/d3ace2907747106... this have "How Lily stands out from other languages:" section
https://gitlab.com/FascinatedBox/lily/-/blob/785a88534cced53... | |
| ▲ | andyferris 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The README on gitlab at least has a sentence or two on that: https://gitlab.com/FascinatedBox/lily > An interpreted language with a focus on expressiveness and type safety Personally I think typed scripting languages could be the future. They should support AOT compilation where necessary. | | |
| ▲ | bonesss 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | F# and C# are typed scripting languages. F# is quite similar to python in script form (.fsx), and has OCamls expressiveness, exhaustive pattern matching, and type inference. That results in highly expressive, terse, and ergonomic domain code. The .Net VM now supports AOT compilation. The future is now-ish :) | |
| ▲ | keyle 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why do you think that's the future? Isn't a waste to essentially reinterpret an entire program that may be run 5000 times a day? AOT compilation, how is that different than make && run? At some point, you have a compiled language, if it's quick to compile, you're doing the AOT yourself, the scripting is an illusion. Pun intended. | | |
| ▲ | Syzygies 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Isn't a waste to essentially reinterpret an entire program that may be run 5000 times a day? This is a dated prejudice that I shared. To get started coding with AI I made a dozen language comparison project for a toy math problem. F# floored me with how fast it was, nearly edging out C and Rust on my leaderboard, twice as fast as OCaml, and faster than various compiled languages. Compiling could in principle be fastest, if we had compilers that profiled hours of execution before optimizing code, and only then for "stable" problems. No one writes a compiler like this. In practice, Just In Time interpreters are getting all the love, and it shows. They adapt to the computation. My dated prejudice did not allow for this. | |
| ▲ | nine_k 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn't it a waste to run a test suite for a program that would run 1M times a day in production? The key adjective here is successfully run. You want to detect any errors as early as possible. Ideally even at the early stages of writing the script, when a typechecker is already able to point at certain errors, and thus help avoid missteps in further design. |
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| ▲ | nofriend 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | a statically typed aot compiled scripting language is... not | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I script with Rust via cargo-script, it works great. Scripting is a task for when you want to achieve something in one file instead of a full blown application. It is not about the language, you can script in C or assembly if you so chose. | |
| ▲ | nine_k 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Scripting" is a role: an embedded, human-friendly, compact language, also suitable for interactive work / REPL. (Laugh all you want, but Haskell has a rather nice REPL, and can work as a scripting language.) | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Luau gets pretty close to statically typed and AOT compiled now. It's still a scripting language. Even C or Rust can be a scripting language. You just integrate the toolchain to your app, same as every other scripting language. | | |
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| ▲ | EagnaIonat 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > why Building a program language is like poetry. Everyone does it at some point, just most of us know never to share it. | | |
| ▲ | saghm 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That just moves the question to "why is this one being shared" then. I don't think "because the authors didn't know better than to avoid sharing it like 'most of us'" is a particularly good answer. |
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| ▲ | poulpy123 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 99.9% of the time it will be "just because" | |
| ▲ | paulddraper 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | From the link: > Key features of Lily: > Built-in template mode > Embed/extend in C > Single-inheritance classes > Exceptions > Generics > Algebraic data types (with Option and Result predefined). | | |
| ▲ | andsoitis 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | That’s what. Not why. | | |
| ▲ | nine_k 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The why: because Lua, Python, JavaScript, Janet, etc lack many or all these features. And each of these features is known to make life easier for a human programmer. | | |
| ▲ | dismalaf 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Looking through that list of features, Ruby (the dynamic language I know best) has all but 1 built-in (and the other can be added with Gems). I'm guessing Python probably has them all too (but I don't know Python that well). They're pretty common. So the why still isn't clear. | | |
| ▲ | nine_k 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Is Ruby easy to embed in a C program? | | |
| ▲ | debugnik 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | RPG Maker used to embed Ruby before it was cool (and before they switched to JS for web support). | |
| ▲ | bandrami 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That was originally the point of Ruby | |
| ▲ | dismalaf 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes -> https://mruby.org It's also incredibly easy to extend the main Ruby implementation with C, C++, Odin, Zig, Rust, Fortran, etc... Literally a few lines. | | |
| ▲ | vidarh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The main Ruby implementation is also fairly easy to embed. It's just not easy to embed multiple MRI ruby instances in a single application, and it's also a lot bigger than mruby. |
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| ▲ | paulddraper 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reason it exists is to provide those features when programming computers. |
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| ▲ | pansa2 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > statically-typed > Embed/extend in C Is Lily intended to be (or could it be used as) a statically-typed alternative to Lua? Personally I'm happy with dynamic typing for scripting - but I suspect many people would welcome a statically-typed option, and there don't seem to be many available. |
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| ▲ | roxolotl 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’m a sucker for little embeddable languages but I’m even more of a sucker for rpn. Wonderful little example shows how simple of a math scheme it is. |
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| ▲ | lagniappe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One thing I very much appreciate in new-lang posts is seeing a code example above-the-fold, front and center. Kudos to the authors. |
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| ▲ | oncallthrow 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why not just use Ok/Error which is an accepted idiom and shorter than Success/Failure? I see this so often in new languages, making poor choices seemingly only to distinguish themselves from existing languages |
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| ▲ | aiexplorations 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would like to understand the motivations for building another programming language when in fact, firstly, a lot of code is being written by Claude and the like, and secondly, the existing languages and low level options like C, Assembly have become more accessible now thanks to AI coding tools. |
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| ▲ | Rochus 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, it's like a few people still make music, even if there is Suno ;-) |
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| ▲ | publicdebates an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It uses refcounting, and GC for cycles. Sounds good. Why don't more Lua-likes? |
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| ▲ | boxed 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > for v in values: { Both colon and {... why? And it seems very mixed in the example. |
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| ▲ | OJFord 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I have no knowledge of lily, but a good reason could be for example that you can do `: print(v)`, but need braces for a multi-line block. Or that braces are the difference between creating a new scope and not. It's not necessarily just syntax for the sake of it. |
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| ▲ | 7e 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Has anyone yet designed a language with the explicit goal of being cheapest/easiest to use by an AI coding agent? |
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