Using Bosque in JupyterLab
A few years ago, I discovered an interesting Microsoft Research Project called “BOSQUE” (back then, it was in all caps). The aim was to develop a programming language that promoted the regularized programming paradigm. Just like structured programming and abstract data types in the ’70s freed software developers from the underlying intricacies of the hardware, regularized programming promises to free us from “computational substrates.” Although this article is about my experiences with building extensions and kernels for JupyterLab, I think it’s important to explain the advantages of Bosque and why you should learn it. Since this language is still evolving, the following explanations are based on my own experience and reading of the relevant documents and reports. I strongly encourage anyone interested in Bosque to read available documents and run some of the code available (for example, in JupyterLab with Bosque support).
Dealing with “machine words” (chunks of memory defined by hardware vendors) in the ’70s was just as common as dealing with loops these days. Imagine yourself looking at machine words and writing programs that interpret some of them as “printable text,” “non-printable escape sequences,” “float numbers,” “double floats,” etc. Abstract Data Types freed us from dealing with such vendor-specifics. The same can be said for functions, loops, and statements in general. Instead of writing programs that dealt with machine addresses, base pointers, stack pointers, jumps, and other hardware specifics, we went a step higher and invented Structured Programming. Our software could now be structured in terms we could think about instead of thinking in accidental hardware intricacies. We, so to speak, added an additional layer of indirection to free ourselves. Just as we invented loops to eliminate dealing with registers, addresses, and jumps, Bosque is now going a step higher by removing loops and restricting recursions. Instead of handling loop structures, we move to a higher level and focus on intents. When I loop over something, I am actually expressing an intent toward a structure that should be handled in some way, like “iterate over this list and multiply each of its elements by 2.” The structure that performs the looping is not that important. That’s why we don’t need loops in Bosque—because we focus on the programmer’s intents rather than on structures like for, while, do-while, etc.
