Penelopea, EYG's mascotEYG news from @CrowdhailerIssue #10

Strong foundations, a blog post and a conference talk.

The last few months have been about building strong foundations and ergonomic improvements. I wrote about why I built the language, and EYG got a shoutout in a conference talk. This shout out wasn't even from me.

A programming language for humans

I wrote a post about why I started EYG, what it's all about and the principles I believe in. In summary, EYG will always be about maximising the ability of humans to get computers to work for them.

This was not the only time EYG was talked about. Ray, who has been following EYG for a while, featured it in his talk at the Software Should Work conference.

A collection of improvements

  • Run content-addressed modules and published packages directly with commands such as eyg eval @standard or eyg check #abc1234.

  • Imports and filesystem effects are consistent with each other and resolve from the file containing the expression. If the current working directory is needed, use the new CWD effect. This keeps the process location explicit and allows runtimes to drop the concept of a current working directory entirely. The complete rules and examples are in the file resolution guide.

  • A new eyg parse command to print the canonical DAG-JSON IR. sh eyg parse -c '{answer: 42}' // {"0":"a","a":{"0":"u"},"f":{"0":"a","a":{"0":"i","v":42},"f":{"0":"e","l":"answer"}}}

  • EYG programs can parse source text with the EYGParse effect. This effect can be used to write transpilers or interpreters in EYG.

  • UTF-8 now works correctly in strings and comments, and the lexer is substantially faster by working on bitarrays and not strings.

  • Interpreter values no longer contain JavaScript promises. This allows the interpreter to run on the BEAM runtime. The JavaScript runtimes will reject integers outside the max safe range instead of silently rounding them.

  • A better foundation clarifying the role of harness, platform and system inspired by the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) from the Rust ecosystem. I will have more to write about this in the future. If you want to dive in now check out the pal package

New guides

A guide for making web requests using the @standard.fetch module.

The aok testing package now separates value assertions from expectations about effects. Follow the guide to writing EYG tests.

One more thing

I have been experimenting on a next implementation of Overlay, my agent harness. This time it runs EYG code in the browser, allowing the agent to use browser specific effects such as Download.

This video shows it in action. You can try it at eyg.run/overlay; you will need to bring your own API token.

Both Overlay and the editor have the same effects available to the EYG scripts because they use exactly the same harness. My next goal is to make some more interesting harnesses, to prove how easy it is to embed EYG in all kinds of applications. I would like to build a scriptable task list or add scripting to a game.

That's all for this update, I hope you have enjoyed it.

This issue is available, and shareable, at https://eyg.run/news/editions/10