There are a lot of programming languages coming up these days and it’s turning into a topic of debate with everyone talking about complexity and simplicity of a programming language. In this context, many are attempting to start writing new languages – this has given rise to a new programming paradigm.
A Microsoft researcher called Mark Marron has also started writing a new programme called Bosque along with a new concept called ‘regularized’ programming.
Recently Mark Marron released a white paper on Bosque which is slowly catching up with everyone in the technology space. This is what my blog is about–BOSQUE.
What is REGULARIZED programming -
Programming paradigm has changed from imperative, to declarative, to procedural, to structural and now to a brand-new regularized programming paradigm.
Now, the question is, what regularized programming is –Is it just an incremental improvement of structural programming which avoids accidental complexity? Most often, at the time of development, we need to face complexity in understanding of looping and recursion functionality. To avoid that complexity, Mark Marron introduced regularized programming.
Now let’s delve into the crux of this blog– What is Bosque?
Bosque is a Spanish word that means forest.
Bosque is a new open-source programming language. This is a brainchild of Microsoft computer scientist Mark Marron, who describes the language as an effort to move beyond the structured programming model that became popular in the 1970s.
According to him –
“The Bosque programming language is designed for writing code that is simple, obvious, and easy to reason about for both humans and machines. The key design features of the language provide ways to avoid accidental complexity in the development and coding process. The goal is improved developer productivity, increased software quality, and enabling a range of new compilers and developer tooling experiences”.
Installation
Bosque was inspired by the syntax and types of TypeScript and the semantics of ML and Node/JavaScript.
To run Bosque on your system, you first need to install Node.js and typescript.
You can refer Git repository for more details –
https://github.com/Microsoft/BosqueLanguage
Syntax -
How Bosque looks like – here is an example showing the code snippet of addition of two numbers
function add (x: Int, y: Int): Int {
return x + y;
}
add (2, 3) //5
Using Bosque programming –
The current focus of the Bosque project is core language design. As a result, there is limited support for compilation/development and no support for packaging, deployment, lifecycle management, etc.
I hope this is helpful information to understand what Bosque is.
References:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/bosque-programming-language/
https://opensourceforu.com/2019/04/microsoft-launches-open-source-programming-language-bosque/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/18/microsoft_bosque_programming_language/