I would strongly suggest having a paragraph, right on the home page, explaining what an "evidence-oriented" language is and how it differs from conventional languages.
In other words, consider looking at your home page through the eye of someone who knows NOTHING about what you are doing.
I'm going to call B.S. on this approach. When you look at the language it looks suspiciously like most other programming languages in terms of syntax.
What it's telling us is that the evidence is that most people kind of like their own programming language and want to modify nits.
The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully different. They certainly are not going to find anything that aligns with real ergonomic research into language design, like that done by PPIG ( http://www.ppig.org/ ) and other groups.
> it looks suspiciously like most other programming languages in terms of syntax.
Why would this be a criticism? Many languages have been aligning syntactically for decades.
> The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully different.
Given their rigorous evidenciary method is a byline "Submitted claims will be examined by experts in potentially a variety of fields (e.g., statistics, experimental design, psychology, computer science).", that's likely.
Looks like an attempt to introduce some measure of scientific rigor to the design-by-committee paradigm, with a new programming language as its goal. Interesting, it could lead to some good ideas.
I'll wager that it won't be possible to assess many of the choices involved in a completely objective way, since the participants in each study will have prejudices and familiarities which will bias the results. Because of the science-oriented positioning, my guess is this language will be somewhat like Python (not that that is a bad thing).
Your summary seems accurate, but if we are understanding correctly, I don't think what they're attempting is even possible.
The problem is that all the features of a language interact, and scientific experiments try to isolate variables. So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.
If someone can provide an example of evidence-based language design, I'd be interested. But right now I don't really see it.
Why not have an evidence-based car or plane design? Like programming languages, these things are complex enough that they require historical exemplars and rules of thumb. You can't really expect to explore the design space from scratch.
This is basically a crowd-sourced programming language with fact-checking (by experimentation, on proposals before they are added).
A reductive explanation, yes, but I don't think it's inaccurate, based on what I could find on their site. Would love to be corrected if there's some large part I missed.
As far as actually constructive criticism, I'd really love it if this was the first thing I saw on quorumlang's homepage.
"Programming languages should be designed with human factors as a primary concern.
Traditional programming languages have been designed predominately with technical concepts and machines in mind. While such concerns are obviously critical, human beings ultimately use such tools in the broad development community. In evidence-oriented programming, human factors evidence takes a first-class seat in the language's design. All factors related to programming are considered, up for debate, and are subject to change if a community member shows rigorous evidence that another approach is better. This is true both for technical and human factors considerations. To our knowledge, Quorum is the first programming language to attempt this."
While in theory, it seems a good idea, in practice I'm not so sure about their results: for example using '+' for string concatenation while present in many languages is IMHO a bad idea: D use '~' instead: much cleaner to distinguish addition and concatenation otherwise x[] + y[] is ambiguous: element wise addition, concatenation? Who knows..
IIRC their first experiments focused on the names of keywords and types, where they found, e.g. that "text" is a more familiar type name than "string". Presumably they'll later apply the same approach to syntax and then semantics.
[+] [-] payne92|11 years ago|reply
In other words, consider looking at your home page through the eye of someone who knows NOTHING about what you are doing.
[+] [-] avn2109|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blixt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golemotron|11 years ago|reply
What it's telling us is that the evidence is that most people kind of like their own programming language and want to modify nits.
The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully different. They certainly are not going to find anything that aligns with real ergonomic research into language design, like that done by PPIG ( http://www.ppig.org/ ) and other groups.
[+] [-] jack9|11 years ago|reply
Why would this be a criticism? Many languages have been aligning syntactically for decades.
> The designers are not going to find anything different meaningfully different.
Given their rigorous evidenciary method is a byline "Submitted claims will be examined by experts in potentially a variety of fields (e.g., statistics, experimental design, psychology, computer science).", that's likely.
[+] [-] guscost|11 years ago|reply
I'll wager that it won't be possible to assess many of the choices involved in a completely objective way, since the participants in each study will have prejudices and familiarities which will bias the results. Because of the science-oriented positioning, my guess is this language will be somewhat like Python (not that that is a bad thing).
[+] [-] chubot|11 years ago|reply
The problem is that all the features of a language interact, and scientific experiments try to isolate variables. So you will end up with a bunch of choices that are good in isolation, but an incoherent whole.
If someone can provide an example of evidence-based language design, I'd be interested. But right now I don't really see it.
Why not have an evidence-based car or plane design? Like programming languages, these things are complex enough that they require historical exemplars and rules of thumb. You can't really expect to explore the design space from scratch.
[+] [-] alariccole|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|11 years ago|reply
A reductive explanation, yes, but I don't think it's inaccurate, based on what I could find on their site. Would love to be corrected if there's some large part I missed.
As far as actually constructive criticism, I'd really love it if this was the first thing I saw on quorumlang's homepage.
[+] [-] c0ur7n3y|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc2g4d|11 years ago|reply
These feels like a terrible idea. Language designer now equals literature reviewer. But who knows, maybe they'll come up with something good?
Some sample code:
Unfortunately the interpreter at [0] isn't working ("Error: Could not connect to server:")[0] http://www.quorumlanguage.com/documents/hourofcode/part1.php
EDIT: fix code formatting
[+] [-] dudul|11 years ago|reply
I tried the online console: "Error: Could not connect to server". Great.
[+] [-] h4xr|11 years ago|reply
Traditional programming languages have been designed predominately with technical concepts and machines in mind. While such concerns are obviously critical, human beings ultimately use such tools in the broad development community. In evidence-oriented programming, human factors evidence takes a first-class seat in the language's design. All factors related to programming are considered, up for debate, and are subject to change if a community member shows rigorous evidence that another approach is better. This is true both for technical and human factors considerations. To our knowledge, Quorum is the first programming language to attempt this."
http://quorumlanguage.com/evidence.php
So Quorum refers to developers coming to an consensus on what programming approach is better technical or not..
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zenogais|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1wd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travjones|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaftoe|11 years ago|reply
I'm skeptical of this going anywhere, but it's an interesting academic exercise.
[+] [-] jbob2000|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] acd|11 years ago|reply
https://coq.inria.fr