Announcing a private beta of the spiritual successor to Modula2/Oberon

[magicmo...@gmail.com]

Attention all Modula2 lovers, as you are well aware, Prof. Wirth has retired, and is no longer making new languages. However, as a long time disciple of N. Wirth, and a 20 year user of Modula-2, i have undertaken to evolve the language for the next century. I have devised a new language called Beads, which carries on the fine tradition of simplicity and self-contained-ness that exemplified Modula2, but instead of adding complex and abstract features, i have gone back to the roots of why writing computer software is difficult and error-prone, and devised a language that eliminates most common errors.

This new language is called Beads, and it has one property you won't find in any of the top 20 languages, which is that it can run both forwards and in reverse. Having a reverse gear for debugging is of incredible value. And this reverse gear is not just for inside the lab, but is a built-in property of the run-time which means a product in the hands of the user, who encounters a rare condition that might be unrepeatable due to many network, time, and random factors, can be repeated back in the lab if they submit the "breadcrumbs" file, which is following after Hansel and Gretel's method of tracing back their path.

Besides reversibility, it adds audio, video, image manipulation into the language, and also adds physical units of measurement, so that both at compile time and run time the units can be checked for compatibility; all the common units like mass, energy, length, time, power, etc. are predefined with all the conversions built in.

It also includes a wonderful regular expression syntax that avoids using meta-characters, and is 100x more readable than the UNIX one that has been in use for 50 years.

It generates Adobe AIR code for the Mac, Win, iOS, and Android platforms, and can generate Javascript output for use in web apps. The JS output is particularly handy because you only need the compiler, and can use the Safari debugger (available for Mac and Windows platforms).

Because this is a single person project, and because i can't handle input from masses of people at this stage, it is a private beta, but since Modula-2 is one of my favorite languages, I wanted to offer this invitation to this group first. If you are interested, please visit my blog at e-dejong.com, and read more about it, see further details there.

[jan...@gmail.com]

On Friday, August 16, 2019 at 6:10:45 AM UTC+2, magicmo...@gmail.com wrote:

> It generates Adobe AIR code for the Mac, Win, iOS, and Android platforms, and can generate Javascript output for use in web apps. The JS output is particularly handy because you only need the compiler, and can use the Safari debugger (available for Mac and Windows platforms).

Impressive, but no Linux/Unix executables?

[magicmo...@gmail.com]

At the present time the runtime only exists for JS or the AIR-compatible platforms (mac win ios Android). Adobe unfortunately discontinued support for AIR on vanilla Linux. Android has 99% share of linux nowadays, so plain Linux is probably doomed. I figure that Android may eventually hit the linux desktop, as the sophistication of Android is far beyond plain Linux which mostly just shuffles which modules are included, and makes very little progress. This isn't my opinion but the consensus i read from the chat places. I only run Linux in my data center racks, otherwise i run Mac, or Windows inside my mac via VMWare Fusion.

[jan...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 9:15:25 AM UTC+2, magicmo...@gmail.com wrote:
>I only run Linux in my data center racks, otherwise i run Mac, or Windows inside my mac via VMWare Fusion.

Saves me the download. I'll stick with obc which will even run on the Pi.