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damelang
nile
Common Lisp2013–2024
damelang / nile

nile

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17Distinct people
20Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
740GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year20 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-07-31 02:43:06 UTC to 2024-03-07 03:26:15 UTC.

012342013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

20 sources
bobajeff·Mar 7, 2024
>you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers. I'm very interested in knowing what array languages they were researching. The only thing I can find is Nile[1] but from the examples it doesn't look like an array language to me. [1] https://github.com/damelang/nile
In Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]
chubot·Apr 24, 2021
I would like to see it too, and I even referred to it in a comment a few days ago. Did they release the code or just describe it in papers and talks? A cursory look at the website and Googling says the latter, which is a shame. The research would be more impactful with source code. There's no reason not to release the source, and if you fail to do so, you can't really complain if practitioners don't pick up those techniques :) I think OMeta was related and that is released, but IMO it's not that practical. ----- Thread from 5 years ago that is not that flattering of their work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325 Oh it actually points to some more source: https://github.com/damelang/nile Although I think it's easy to pick on different parts; there's definitely value to having a holistic system and design. But it would be bet
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ter if we could see all of it instead of just the parts
In Viewpoints Research Institute concluded its operations at the beginning of 2018
chriswarbo·Aug 5, 2020
Viewpoints Research Institute (VPRI) tried to make such a system around 10 years ago http://www.vpri.org (e.g. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf ) IIRC it bootstraps from a prescheme-like language into a Smalltalk-like dynamic language ( https://www.piumarta.com/software/maru https://www.piumarta.com/software/cola ), and uses PEG parsers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta ) to implement domain-specific languages, e.g. the Nile graphics language ( https://github.com/damelang/nile )
In A Plea for Lean Software (1995) [pdf]
scroot·Mar 16, 2020
All of those guys had funding trouble. Even HARC didn't last more than a couple of years, I think because the funders pulled out. That Nile/Gezira has languished is especially tough, but I think that's partially because Amelang had some personal troubles [1]. Note that at the bottom of that Github issue there is a link to a recent talk by Amelang in which, eventually, he talks about a new language he is working on called Bert or something. I'm thinking it's a next-gen follow up to Nile. [1] https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/3
In Lisp Comes of Age (1980)
chenglou·May 6, 2019
Since Alan Kay mentioned Nile, I'm gonna dump here the list of relevant resources on Nile and its derivative works that I've found over time: Ohm, the successor to the parser (Ometa) used by Nile: https://github.com/harc/ohm Maru, Nile's compiler/interpreter/whatever: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/157xdz/maru_is... Nile itself: https://github.com/damelang/nile (pdf presentation in README) https://programmingmadecomplicated.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/... Gezira, svg drawing lib on top of Nile: https://github.com/damelang/gezira/blob/master/nl/stroke.nl http://web.archive.org/web/20160310162228/http://www.vpri.or... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P97O8osukZ0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8085728 (check the demo video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY (live demo on stage later on) https://github.com/damelang
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/gezira/tree/master/js/demos (downloadable and runnable in browser) KScript, UI building on top of Nile: https://www.freudenbergs.de/bert/publications/Ohshima-2013-K... http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/KSWorld.ks/ Final Viewpoint Research Institute report, where the entire system (antialiasing, font rendering, svg, etc) was rendered using Nile into Frank, the word/excel/powerpoint equivalent written completely in Nile + Gezira + KScript): http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf VPRI wiki restored from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20171121105004/http://www.vpri.o... Shadama, which the Nile author (Dan Amelang) worked on too: https://2017.splashcon.org/event/live-2017-shadama-a-particl... Partial DOM reimplementation on top of Gezira: https://github.com/damelang/mico/blob/master/gezira/svg.js Partial reimplementation of Gezira: https://github.com/Twinside/Rasterific And the famous Nile Viewer itself (everything interactive): http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/high_contrast.html https://github.com/damelang/nile/tree/master/viz/NileViewer Commentary: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4325#comment-66502 https://fonc.vpri.narkive.com/rtIMYQdk/nile-gezira-was-re-1-... http://forum.world.st/Vector-Graphics-was-Pi-performance-fun... Since Alan Kay himself is on Hacker News, maybe he can comment with more links I couldn't find. It's hard to fire up the live Frank environment, though understandably reproducing the working env might not have been a top goal. Maybe someone more cunning can merge these into a single executable repo or whatever so that I can stop playing archaeologist =)
In Alan Kay on “What Made APL Programming So Revolutionary?”
mpweiher·Aug 25, 2018
The ~20KLOC of Xerox PARC was the entire system, not just the kernel, and included, among other things: - the kernel/OS - the windowing GUI - the programming language, compiler, libraries - the visual IDE - Networking - E-Mail/Chat - ... I am not sure DTP/Word Processing was also included, it might have been a separate system. Now I am a huge fan of QNX, used it and developed for it a bit in the 90s, but the version that fit on a floppy didn't cover anywhere near as much. Also, QNX is built on a message passing kernel...hmm... You also left out Amiga Exec + Intuition, which is also amazingly compact and was built in C...but using OO concepts, which are implementable in C. For example, everything in the kernel is a List, and so specific concepts like ports effectively subclass List (with function tables etc.) See also: Objective-C. Pla
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n 9 is also very, very cool, and its "everything is a file" (no really, everything) is not that dissimilar to everything is an object. Part of my own work[1] is trying to find the common ground between these two approaches, with a good amount of success. Anyway, the Plan 9 distribution is 1.5 million lines of code. The Acme text editor and cc compiler alone sum to 20KLOC. libdraw is another 5KLOC etc. So Plan 9 is good, Smalltalk is arguably better, but I think we can (and have to) do better still, see VPRI[2]. Coming back to Brooks for a second: in NSB, he saw OO as one of the few hopes for tackling the problem, and in an OOPSLA panel 20 years later he opined that it had largely succeeded[3]. That said, I agree with your take that software tends to be much, much more complicated than it has any need or rights to be. I attribute much of this to architectural mismatch[4], particularly in the domain of UI-intensive systems[5] For example, much of the complexity of UI programs can be removed by modeling them using high-level dataflow constraints[6], combined with compositional storage. Dataflow also seems to be a very powerful reduction factor, Unix pipes/filters still rule (see Doug McIllroy's response to Bentley's challenge), and Dan Amelang's Nile/Gezira does a modern 2 1/2D compositing graphics subsystem in ~500 lines of dataflow code[7] [1] http://objective.st [2] http://www.vpri.org [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221321794_No_silver... [4] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/able/www/paper_... [5] http://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/ehci/ehci2007/Chatty07.pdf [6] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media... [7] https://github.com/damelang/nile
In Fred Brooks vs. Dijkstra? (2015)
e12e·Nov 10, 2015
> Though GH repo is not updated for more than 3 years and maybe it's just my inexperience or I am spoiled, but from lack of proper documentation I have no idea how to setup and use this language? On what platforms does it work? Looks very interesting, it's a bit sad to see things like: https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/4 Mostly hanging from this summer. I would love it if more of these code dumps from research projects at least included a section on how to get the examples running (and something on requirements, such as which OS it has been tested on, even if that turns out to be "Only tested on DOS 2.1").
In The Nile Programming Language
azeirah·Nov 9, 2015
Nile is a language built by Dan Amelang, a researcher @ viewpoints research institute. It is a language made for graphics rendering, it has the goal of having no incidental complexity. 2D vector graphics rendering as an example, takes ~10.000 lines of code using traditional libraries like Cairo (used by Firefox) or Skia (used by Android and Chrome). In Nile, it's 200 lines of code. Check out this repo, and the pdf inside the readme https://github.com/damelang/nile
In TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

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