Cognitive Consonance

If you search the web you can find some discussions on whether IDEs for dynamic languages can be as helpful as IDEs for static languages. The issue is that static languages like Java have compile-time (thus easy to get at IDE-time) information in order to provide that fundamental code-completion functionality (among many others). If the IDE knows that a certain parameter is a String, than it is simple: it will present to you all the String methods when you type in the dot. For dynamic languages things get more complex are there is formally no (by definition) compile-time information. Some people would argue that there are ways around it (which you can already find in existing IDEs, I remember having some sort of code completion, years ago, on SPE – for Python). I will not add anything to that discussion here, this preamble was mainly for putting the reader in context. I am more interested in discussing good IDEs for DSLs.

With DSLs you get, most of the times, added syntax. Worse than that, you might fall into situations where you have changed (not only added) the initial language syntax; furthermore those syntax changes might even become valid only in runtime (imagine that a method is added to a class that is supplying DSL methods).

One example comes from Ioke and Prolog operator precedence and associativity rules which are changeable (see the previous post). It is not trivial to know if something like 1+2 is even syntactically valid (*). Even if it is syntactically valid things like association rules might change. In languages like Groovy you can add (e.g., through categories) methods to code blocs (from classes that can be dynamically changed). Then there is dynamic dispatching and macros. What is valid in a certain piece of code can be different from what is valid a few lines below. In fact, complete information of what is valid in a certain code block might require code execution. Or, to put in another way, it might be very difficult to have a completely helpful IDE! In this scenario there are 3 considerations that I think are worth being done:

1. One should not be discouraged for not having perfect solutions. Maybe it is not possible to determine all that can be expressed in a certain code block, but sometimes good approximations are enough.
2. On this issue, one good example comes from Prolog: In Prolog, syntax can be changed mainly through the use of the p directive (and through asserts and retracts). The p directive changes operators but is very easy to analyze pre-compilation/interpretation. So, the way DSLs are normally be constructed lend themselves very easily to code analysis which can be used by IDEs. This unfortunately not the case in most real-world languages.
3. It would be cool to have a language where DSL specifications could be automatically used to construct IDEs. The current real-world DSL-able languages (Ruby, Groovy, …) are DSL-enabled through indirect techniques which can be used to build DSLs (Dynamic reception, operator overload, whatever), in fact many of these techniques exist with other objectives than creating DSLs. If there was a declarative and explicit way to create DSLs, that information could be used to inform IDEs on parsing and other issues. An embedded, core way, to explicitly specify DSLs.

(*) I suppose some will see this as an argument for the fact that you can do pretty stupid (or at least unintuitive) things with DSLs. Well, you can do stupid things with everything. The question is not if you can or not, but the extent of bad use cases and how bad uses can creep in easily. Another (interesting) discussion, but not for now.

I was reading Ola Bini’s post about operators in Ioke (Ioke being the new language that Ola is developing).

It is a common saying around LISPers that everything that is being done in “modern” languages is a return to LISP. And the argument holds some ground. The truth is, among the 4 most conceptually influential programming languages that I can think of (Lisp/Functional, Fortran/Imperative, Smalltalk/OO, Prolog/Logic), the bad option (Fortran) won as it is the major philosophical contributor to current programming languages (much more than Smalltalk).

Take the reinvention of operators on Ioke as per the post above. This concept is available in Prolog for decades. It is all there: precedence (i.e. 2*3+4 means (2*3)+4 and not 2*(3+4)). Associativity (left or right – ie. 3-2-1 is 0 (3-2)-1 and not 2 3-(2-1) ). And even more as new operators can be defined and can be made of alphanumeric characters (want to create a new operator called say, “in”? go ahead). In fact people were doing DSLs a long time ago (in the small Prolog community at least) using techniques such as these.

The next thing that you will need (and we are getting there with macros and AST access) is no default interpretation. This is especially important with arithmetic, let me give an example:

Imagine the expression 1+x. Most languages will evaluate this expression and will return the sum of 1 + x. If x is defined and say is 4, then 1+x is 5. If x is not defined then an error (compile or run)-time will be raised. This is an absolute disgrace for DSLs with are essentially declarative (i.e., detached from semantics). “1+x” might be something that you want to evaluate now (and get the result) or might be something that you want to specify in order to evaluate later (say, I want to do a chart of all values of x between 1 and 5, or I want to differentiate), look at this pseudo-code

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Var x
Exp expression = 1 + x**2
 
chart(expression, [[x,[1, 5]]]) //do a chart, x between 1 and 5
evaluate(expression, [[x,3]]) //Evaluate expression where x is 3 (i.e.  10)
diffe = differentiate(expression, x) //returns the expression 2*x
prettyprint(expression) //Pretty prints the expression.

Most people automatically associate the operation evaluate to 1+x**2. That might be so in an imperative world (can I call it shitty world?). But in an declarative/DSL world 1+x**2 is just that, an expression, it has no meaning attached per se. What you do with it depends on the context. Pretty print it, differentiate it, integrate it, or even evaluate it by instantiating x to 3 and getting the “precious” 10.

Update: I was rereading the post and noticed that it might be read as seeing Ola’s work as less interesting. Not at all: I actually think the way forward is precisely improving the current “imperative” setting in the way Ola is doing.