This post is about the evolution of Futhark’s type checker, motivated by a large refactoring I am about to merge. It is probably mostly of interest to other language designers, and contains some lessons I wish I had known when we first got started – although I am not particularly well-read in the type checking literature, so it’s possible all of this is old hat.
↫ The Futhark Programming Language blog
That’s a clear introduction – you know what to expect.
I never understood, why especially you as a translator with deep knowledge of syntax and sentence construct, cannot grasp the basis of programming language.
Python is really easy to start with as it it using weak typing (you don’t have to enforce variable type as it can change from string to numeric with the next assignment).
Hence you really should consider https://jupyter.org/ -> https://jupyter.org/try to start with the best languages out there (Julia, Python, R) with a great development interface where you can interlace code, result and documentation.
Futhark is strongly typed though as you have to set a type for a variable (hence know the range of data it could hold to select the right “size” and its “sign”),
If you want something more “functional” oriented (with less parenthesis though) you can try https://factorcode.org/ or https://yona-lang.org/ to focus on the “business logic” and not the typing and syntax cruft of the language.
Really, give it a try, start with a “Hello world” to understand how things connects together, preferably with a step-by-step debugger so that you can understand what is happening when every line is executed, then as you get more experienced and knowing/anticipating the expected result, you can write more code in one go and check only at the end (with print or assert).
Next step is create functions and pass parameters to “modularize” your code. Then create “modules” to split your code between different files.
May the Forth (good language also) be with you…
It’s a shame that Futhark is slop made with copilot 🙁
Another shame is that they are using the name of TWO runic alphabets.