Personally, I found the initial intro surprisingly easy to read and digest. I got double surprised when I noticed this is written in Haskell (IIUC) - for a thing created by a Haskell guy, this is incredibly readable and easy to digest. Typically you'd get swamped by monads, morphisms, equations and deep CompSci references. I can only say thank you for really putting an effort into making the readme approachable. I know how much work a reader-oriented readme takes. And another huge congrats for releasing and publishing on HN! This looks super interesting.
I'd be interested to hear what about it made it easy to read and digest. For example, it starts with
> The (with identity.bind (...)) is the same as the do-notation in Haskell or other languages, specialized to the identity monad.
The next section is called "Types as Exponentializers". The section after that explains
> That is, a lambda-abstraction is translated into a tuple consists of (0) the type of its closed chain, (1) its closed chain, and (2) a pointer to an appropriately-arranged closed function
As a Haskell fan this sounds like perfectly normal Haskell-speak. Is there something about it that makes is more digestible to you than the average Haskell-speak?
There are various reading/learning styles. For a "understand each step before moving to the next" style, local incomprehensibility has strong implications for global. But for a "didn't understand that bit, so skip ahead" style, what matters is recoverability - robustness to localized incomprehension. How "lost" you become when you don't understand some bit.
Here, if you don't understand identity.bind, or even do-notation, you can read on without losing much. Not understanding the section title, is not an obstacle to understanding the section. And so on.
The intro has nice non-local clarity. The dialog structure; having summaries.
I'd not stereotype a "Haskell writing style", but I certainly encounter writing elsewhere which seems to reflect a mindset of "since you've reached this paragraph N, you obviously fully understand, remember, and appreciate the implications of, everything that has been said earlier, so we can happily take this next step without any distracting redundancy, context, motivation, or other annotation". Which... needs to be approached in a particular way to avoid degrading nongracefully.
I also appreciated the intro's "here's how I suggest approaching learning the language".
Heh, sorry, you're totally right, parts are definitively 100% Haskell-speak for sure (and I totally jumped over them with 0 understanding); what I really meant and failed to clearly convey, is that there are the other parts, including esp. the intro paragraphs, that (at least) to me personally were very approachable. Looking over again:
"Neut is (...) memory management" - first para ok, incl. the bullet list - specifically what original commenter complained about, for me was no problemo
"Theoretically (...) terms of the type" - 100% Haskell-speak, no slightest idea what it means, skipped; but relatively short optically, and author still has some credit after first para, so I still take a look further
"Practically, this means (...)" - cool, I can understand again! I think that's where I got hooked: now I know the author sprinkles their Haskell-speak because of an unstoppable inner need to be precise and probably also so that the tribe doesn't expell them, but they also seem to have this amazing spark of humanity and empathy towards common programmer folk, so that if I skip over the mysterious ivory-tower spells, I will find more nuggets of commoner-speak for me. Knowing a bit more about writing, I believe they additionally probably consciously put a lot of effort to write in an approachable way. Which is a surprisingly tough skill. This is a mix I honestly bow to. I can try and list more paras that were cool for me if you'd specifically like me to.
That is a great summary from an outsider perspective, I hope when I post my in-progress language release (on July 1), someone like you is around to give such an honest read.
P.S. Also, I only put that July 1 date as further personal reinforcement that I am going to meet my self imposed release deadline. Gotta keep the pressure on or I’m sure I’ll hold it as a private project forever.
