People keep asking us why EO exists, since the world hardly needs yet another programming language. It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer. EO is not trying to out-comfort Java or out-hype Rust. It is a research instrument pointed at one old, specific, and still unsolved problem: object-oriented code is pleasant for programmers to write and expensive for computers to run.
Until recently, an object in EO was whatever a single .eo file said it was.
If you wanted number to know how to raise itself to a power,
you either grew number.eo until nobody could read it,
or you parked the operation in some other object with a made-up name.
We took a third road:
an object and the package named after it are now the same thing,
so number is defined by number.eo and by every file under number/.
Ask two EO programmers to lay out the same object and you may well get two different files. One stacks everything vertically, another folds it onto a single line, and both are correct. We would rather the compiler decided, and always arrived at the same, prettiest answer. So we taught it to score every possible layout and pick the one that hurts the least.
A while ago we explained
what the >> syntax stands for:
it auto-names an abstract object when a meaningful name is unnecessary,
and the compiler quietly generates a random unique one under the hood.
Recently we let this same >> carry a handle of your choosing,
and this small change gave EO a new way to hide things.
We call it “encapsulation by obfuscation”.
Since the last blog post, we released a
new version of EO where we got rid of the σ (Sigma) attribute. So, this blog post will try to
explain all special attributes and assets such as Δ (Delta), φ (Phi), σ (Sigma), λ (Lambda),
and ρ (Rho) as promised in one of the previous blog posts.
We’re continuing to observe the features of the latest release of EO, and today we’re talking about new syntax for nameless @-bound-only objects.