[erlang-questions] Potion: was "Erlang for youngsters"

[J David Eisenberg]

On Saturday, August 9, 2014 10:26:10 AM UTC-7, rvirding wrote:
> Hi, have not really been following that thread and just now (yes, I know) saw the reference in Torben's original message that his son thought that elixir looked like Lua. While I don't really agree with that there is an obvious solution that will make it even better:
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> We do Potion which is a new language on the BEAM+OTP with a Lua inspired syntax instead. This would have many benefits:
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> - It would make it much easier for a large group of programmers to get into the erlang fold.
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> - The syntax would be simpler that elixir and would avoid some of its idiosyncrasies.
> - Lua is a fun language to start with.
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> So who would be interested in joining me to do Potion, a new language for the Erlang VM?
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> Robert
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> 
I've been doing some thinking about this lately. One thing I liked about Erlang (and am liking about Clojure and Racket) is that they don't look like imperative languages, so I'm not tempted to think in imperative terms. Given that some of these youngsters may have programmed a Raspberry Pi in Python or JavaScript, that could be a source of "interference" when learning a functional language. Lua looks a lot like those imperative languages also.

I think Lisp Flavored Erlang with a module that can do graphics but hides the complexities of wx might work quite well. It would also allow us to build on the efforts of what people teaching Racket have done; see http://www.bootstrapworld.org/materials/Fall2014/courses/bs1/main.shtml (although its license does not allow remixing)

Using LFE also gives a clear path to Clojure/ClojureScript or Racket if learners want to go off in that direction.

ELM is also quite interesting, and is Haskell-based, but I don't think I want to go there quite yet! 
 
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> On 30 June 2014 23:57, Torben Hoffmann <torben....@REDACTED> wrote:
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> Very interestning!
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> Thx for sharing,
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> Torben
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> Angel Alvarez (GMAIL) writes:
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> > Hi guys,
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> >
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> > Have any you seen this?
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> >
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> > http://twdkz.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/teenage-haskell/
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> >
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> > I hope it is, of interest to this thread despite being haskell related..
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> >
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> > Angel Alvarez
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> > angeljalvarezmiguel at gmail.com
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> > _______________________________________________
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> > erlang-questions mailing list
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> > erlang-q...@REDACTED
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> > http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
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