Pebble has been described (by one of us) as an arcane amalgamation of Python and JavaScript. We hope that's not true (but we'll buy ourselves commemorative mugs if it actually is).
Pebble is intended to be an intuitive, English-friendly, high-level language. Our goal was to balance simplicity with expressive power; to make a language that is easy to pick up the basics in, but which offers a surprisingly rich environment for the advanced user.
We actually created our own programming paradigm to run our language and have tailored our syntax to be consistent with it. Code-named the "call-binding paradigm", this paradigm is robust enough to mimic both object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, and the exact feel can be seasoned to taste by the programmer themselves. We find it cool because in it, classes are methods are objects are classes (check out the demo for details)… also types are first-class citizens.
We also re-imagine other features of what a language should be. We take a novel approach to designing a type system for which we're currently in the process of writing a compile-time checker; we rethink what a null construct should look like and we avoid that-scary-cool-doodad (you know, a monad) when we talk about it; and we reshape code into a more human, conversational flow.
But, enough of these high level, broad characterizations. If you're interested, take a look at the interactive demo. We encourage you to read everything because it nicely explains what's really happening.
Internals
Pretty much all code inside Pebble is built in-house. We wrote our own custom grammar-format, tokenizer, lexer, parser, interpreter, bytecode runtime, and demo-izer (not to be mistaken for the demonizer).
So there's an interactive demo that takes you through the quirks and peculiarities of Pebble. You can view it by running the embedded repl, though you may prefer to run it in a separate tab so you can resize the window and enjoy more real estate. Here is a link to the full repl.
@targetfanttthat by that we mean that each program in Pebble "compiles" into a special binary format that's run on a virtual stack machine. Each instruction has a 1 byte instruction code and a 1 byte operand. If you're familiar with the JVM bytecode or the Python bytecode, its similar to those.
Pebble
Pebble has been described (by one of us) as an arcane amalgamation of Python and JavaScript. We hope that's not true (but we'll buy ourselves commemorative mugs if it actually is).
Pebble is intended to be an intuitive, English-friendly, high-level language. Our goal was to balance simplicity with expressive power; to make a language that is easy to pick up the basics in, but which offers a surprisingly rich environment for the advanced user.
We actually created our own programming paradigm to run our language and have tailored our syntax to be consistent with it. Code-named the "call-binding paradigm", this paradigm is robust enough to mimic both object-oriented and functional programming paradigms, and the exact feel can be seasoned to taste by the programmer themselves. We find it cool because in it, classes are methods are objects are classes (check out the demo for details)… also types are first-class citizens.
We also re-imagine other features of what a language should be. We take a novel approach to designing a type system for which we're currently in the process of writing a compile-time checker; we rethink what a null construct should look like and we avoid that-scary-cool-doodad (you know, a monad) when we talk about it; and we reshape code into a more human, conversational flow.
But, enough of these high level, broad characterizations. If you're interested, take a look at the interactive demo. We encourage you to read everything because it nicely explains what's really happening.
Internals
Pretty much all code inside Pebble is built in-house. We wrote our own custom grammar-format, tokenizer, lexer, parser, interpreter, bytecode runtime, and demo-izer (not to be mistaken for the demonizer).
The code is all open source and can be found here
Demo
So there's an interactive demo that takes you through the quirks and peculiarities of Pebble. You can view it by running the embedded repl, though you may prefer to run it in a separate tab so you can resize the window and enjoy more real estate. Here is a link to the full repl.
Thanks
Pebble has been built by these lovely folks.
@whitemanthedj
@jillianzaff
@timothyjin
@zqianem
and me,
@ktango
We're new, don't know what we're doing, and having a blast.
@targetfanttthat by that we mean that each program in Pebble "compiles" into a special binary format that's run on a virtual stack machine. Each instruction has a 1 byte instruction code and a 1 byte operand. If you're familiar with the JVM bytecode or the Python bytecode, its similar to those.