Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language

It is funny you say this, because nearly every posting of the Pony language includes this comment. And it is always apologized as you need to go to https://tutorial.ponylang.io/ which still doesn't have source on it.

https://github.com/KittyMac/PonyCAT/blob/master/pony-cheat-s...

The project looks hostile to any sort of adoption.

I think Nim has a good homepage, with some bullet points explaining what the language is all about coupled with several code examples. I'm not saying Nim is better, but I visited the page the other day and thought it was neat.

https://nim-lang.org/

I see this comment on all language postings and I just don’t get it. I’m much more curious about the motivation behind the language. If the syntax was that of APL, Forth, or Prolog would you just instantly ignore it because it doesn’t look like Java. I think if the language motivation is compelling then you can decide to dive into a tutorial where the syntax will be explained step by step. I don’t see how syntax can be judged before it is understood. Do you accept/reject languages over simple syntax like curly braces vs begin/end or significant white space, or abbreviations you don’t like eg. def, fun, defun, function, procedure.

I've always loved Factor's homepage, which includes a random snippet of non-trivial (i.e. small but not ‘hello world’) code: https://factorcode.org/

I was also wondering what kind of language this is and where they were hiding all the code. Even the tutorial requires clicking past several pages of (more) introduction before you get to see any code. Probably better to lead with the code. Less waffling, more code would be my recommendation.

The syntax is the least interesting thing about the language, and hello-world examples demonstrate almost none of the syntax.

This bit from the About page is notable: "never write a programming language. That’s like rule #1. Everybody will just tell you it isn’t needed and then argue about syntax."

August 15th and 16th there will be a talk on Pony at the Carolina Code Conference in Greenville, SC.

https://carolina.codes

Example pony applications: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/main/examples

Playground: https://playground.ponylang.io/

They're on HP https://www.ponylang.io/ unfortunately the article link points to /discover/

Notable the Microsoft has not one but two actor model "frameworks": Orleans (for .NET) and Dapr Actors (for containerized workloads).

Is Verona still receiving attention? Seems like a quiet project.

I agree with you, but also, it is legitimately hard to explain concisely the unique aspects of Pony's semantics. My short attempt at it from a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33980738

What I haven't seen anyone mention yet is that syntax exists to concisely express semantics. If you want to give me an immediate feel for your interesting semantics, show me how you express them syntactically.

It may be easier to explain (for instance) Rust's borrow-checker in prose, but if you show me a snippet of code using `&mut`, it'll click for me intuitively that something conceptual and important is happening here. That's why I want an illustrative example at the top of the front page.

I don't have a one-page overview of Pony, but I did listen to https://corecursive.com/055-unproven-with-sean-allen/ in the car a couple of times and that made me want to try it.

> Instead of being able to immediately see the syntax so they can rush back here to make insightful and educated comments on how that syntax compares to $their_fave_lang, they are forced to spend up to 4 or even 5 minutes reading documents clearly describing the design of the language, and being obliged to click on their mouses up to 10 times even in some cases.

Welcome to interface design! Your way of thinking could not be more wrong if you tried :)

How buying stuff on say Amazon works:

1. Click on picture of a car

2. Click "Buy Now"

How it would look like if we apply yours/the Pony website designers' approach:

1. Read a 10 page description of what the car is

2. Click on a link buried on page 12 that lets you buy the thing

Which approach gets more sales?

Personally, I would say that if one is a real PL fanatic, one is more interested in the semantics than the syntax. :)

The problem with the linked docs on the Pony website is not that it doesn't explain the semantics (it does!) but that it seems to be written at a pace appropriate for someone who has no clue what static types even are. [1] Give a concise demonstration of the syntax and the semantics, even if that means that the latter will use terminology that not everyone will understand. Then the full tutorial is there for the details.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722779

It's interesting that Rust and Pony have différent default for addition.

And that it has a nice garbage collector, which is good enough due to the way capabilities work, being per actor, and how references work.

Having a Zulip (preferably self hosted) is sympathetic, compared to having shitty options like Slack. It indicates, that the people care about privacy. A zulip chat I would consider visiting, a Slack would be a hard pass.

I loved playing with this a few years ago, but have lost track of it for a while.

The causality model was great, but is there a way to handle backpressure now?

Thanks!

Pony – High-Performance Safe Actor Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25957307 - Jan 2021 (152 comments)

I clicked one at random (net_ssl) to get a sense of what a package looked like in this ecosystem and how to install it, but it takes you straight to a github page which says it's deprecated and to use a different package (ssl) instead, which is not listed on the packages page.

Not a great look, although it looks like it was only deprecated 2 weeks ago, so I'll give them a pass.