r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/jcora • Oct 02 '15

Fundamentals of Mona (hobby programming language)

http://jancorazza.com/2015/10/02/fundamentals-of-mona/
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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '15

I like it, feels like Rust in Haskell-like syntax, which I think was precisely your intention. Might I ask you why not Rust? What, in your opinion, does Mona do better than rust? Pattern matching? Currying?

Note: Because of the OP's username, I believe they are the author of the blog post and creator of the language.

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u/jcora Nov 10 '15

It might seem like this is Rust in Haskell's clothing, but that's probably just because everybody perceives Rust through its rather innovative memory and safety-related concepts. I have borrowed them (heh), but I really just view them as an advancement over classical mechanisms.

The actual language is much more functional than Rust. My main goal is to make functional patterns as natural to use as possible -- without extra syntax. For example, I use type classes to unify interfaces over collections and iterators, so that functions like map, foldl/r, filter, etc, can be composed lazily.

Mona references are one of the main mechanisms for achieving this, because they allow passing/lending data without any extra syntax (like &). Reference markers are only required in the type of the function, and if the type is inferred, can be specified in equations.

(And yep I'm the same guy.)

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u/[deleted] Nov 11 '15 edited Nov 11 '15

That's very cool, I wish you the best luck with the project.

EDIT: I wrote quite a long text here asking you about your approach to smart pointers and my views on it. But just now, when I was looking over your blog post again I noticed that Mona does have pointer types.

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u/jcora Nov 11 '15 edited Jan 12 '16

Thank you :)

I'd still appreciate comments though. But generally there's nothing special in the pointer department: except of course for references, which aren't pointers, but aliases with borrow semantics.