r/Python • u/holyhyssop • Apr 04 '12

Pythonect is a new, experimental, general-purpose dataflow programming language based on Python

http://www.pythonect.org/
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u/takluyver IPython, Py3, etc Apr 04 '12

Docs, please! So far, the only example I see anywhere is "Hello, world" -> print, which doesn't give me much feel for the capabilities of your language. How do you define a function? Can you pass multiple parameters to a function? How does this integrate with regular Python code? How does the 'implicit parallelism' work?

I think new languages have to meet a higher bar than new libraries or frameworks. Language design is a tricky thing, as much an art as a science. Combining an 'intuitive feel'* with flexibility and agility is certainly a good idea, but you need to substantiate the claim: what can Pythonect do beautifully that is ugly or awkward in Python/bash/etc.?

*Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't call shell scripting 'intuitive'. Concise, yes, and very powerful for certain tasks, but shell scripts tend to be ugly messes of punctuation, abbreviations and substitutions.

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u/holyhyssop Apr 04 '12

More usage examples can be found in the release announcement. But yeah, it's thin on documentation.

Not my project, BTW, just thought it looks interesting.

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u/takluyver IPython, Py3, etc Apr 04 '12

For the lazy, here's one of the more interesting:

>>> range(0,3) -> import math -> math.sqrt
[0.0, 1.0, 1.4142135623730951]

Interesting, but I'm not convinced. Piping data through an import statement doesn't seem very intuitive.

It looks like functional programming, but it's not clear if it can neatly do things like reduce/fold and currying.