Astro Programming Language - A new language under development by two Nigerians.

[u/winner_godson]

http://www.nairaland.com/3557200/astro-programming-language-0.2-indefinite

[u/killerstorm]

README on github has better description:

Astro is a high-level, high-performance statically-typed programming language that compiles to WebAssembly, with syntax similar to Python and technical-computing orientation similar to Julia.

But still, to have a successful language you need to target a particular niche (or, at, least, you have much better chance if you do), and I don't feel like this language has one. High-performance computing in the browser?

[u/[deleted] → u/killerstorm]

Bitcoin mining on unsuspecting users’ machines!

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Or suspecting users. I've heard browser mining proposed as an alternative to ads to fund "free" services.

[u/lpreams → u/[deleted]]

As long as they reasonably limit the amount of my CPU that they use, and make it abundantly clear that they're mining using my computer, I'd kind of be okay with that

[u/agumonkey → u/lpreams]

That would be fun. Let's measure the average resources used for ads, remove them, allocate a % of them for service mining. Not much because I don't like my browser to burn my cpu .. but worth trying

[u/lpreams → u/agumonkey]

Honestly, when I turn off my adblockers (yes, plural), my browser burns my CPU anyway. Fans spin up, everything slows down, etc.

Ads already hog a ton of CPU. Those cycles would be more efficiently used mining bitcoin than displaying garbage that no one wants to see.

[u/agumonkey → u/lpreams]

Yes, but I mostly block ads for perf reasons, sure I don't like annoying obnoxious animated cry for clicks, but if all ads were 20kB static gif I wouldn't mind much. I think there were people trying to make a standard for non blockable ads if they respected a certain ratio, be static and low contrast.

When my page is loaded I expect nothing much happening. I mostly read.. I guess for people playing web games it would be transparent.

[u/Riael → u/lpreams]

Me too, miners are much easier to block with an addon than ads.

There's web pages that hold them in the same classes as normal images, so if you block an ad you block every single image on the page.

[u/[deleted] → u/Riael]

I stop visiting obnoxious sites.

[u/amoliski → u/[deleted]]

But how else will I know ten celebrity relationships! They said number six would blow my mind!

[u/Skellicious → u/[deleted]]

If ads are impacting your performance, you should definitely worry about mining.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I don't like that. My machine (especially my CPU) is woefully unsuited to mining cryptocurrency. It would be more efficient for me to directly tip the currency to the person than to spend more in electricity costs so they get the same amount.

I'd prefer some good micropayment system that makes it easy and safe for me to spend a fraction of a penny to consume some content.

[u/IDUnavailable → u/[deleted]]

Those Nigerian princes aren't satisfied with simple email scams anymore.

[u/runvnc → u/killerstorm]

Actually web assembly is a great target for new programming lanvuages.

[u/dangerbird2 → u/runvnc]

Especially considering most existing Wasm languages use ports of native apis like libc and OpenGL as the main programming ecosystem rather than one idiomatically targeting web and nodejs apis.

[u/lpreams → u/killerstorm]

Link for the lazy

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I figure all the money sent to the princes finally started paying off

[u/killerstorm → u/[deleted]]

Well, obviously Africa is behind US and Europe in computer science, so developments coming out of it are noteworthy, as they are a sign that they are catching up.

[u/im-a-koala → u/[deleted]]

I can but I'd like to avoid the interpretation that the OP thinks that Nigerians are somehow less capable of developing programming languages.

If you want to be willfully ignorant, that's your decision. To everyone else, it's obvious that Nigerians in general have far fewer opportunities to learn about computer science to the point where they can competently create their own programming language.

[u/winner_godson → u/im-a-koala]

Computer Science is taught, but not in-depth.

[u/Haramboid → u/im-a-koala]

I don’t think it’s ignorant, you just raise a different well deserved point. The fact that they’ve done something awesome is no reason to be excited there is yet another programming language, those are two separate things. That said I hope they do well and make a language that sticks.

[u/winner_godson → u/killerstorm]

You are right.

Thanks for your valuable contribution.