Alex talked about Clarity, a language for running on the Blockstack blockchain. He recently worked on a hackathon for it. One of the motivations was to improve his functional programming – Clarity is very Lisp-like, and so being forced into a functional mindset was useful for learning. Another motivation was that Clarity were offering cash prizes. Clarity is pretty new – and things like the test framework and code syntax highlighting are very new.
Alex wrote a high score system that runs in Clarity – that will maintain the high scores for a game long-term, rather than needing to be maintained by a particular game developer on their own server.
There are various limitations to Clarity because of the nature of running on the blockchain – like an inability to perform loops, because it’s not possible to prove that they resolve in a reasonable length of time, due to the halting problem. And some primitives cost money, like storing and retrieving variables in the blockchain.
There is a built-in testing framework, that allows you to test your code on your local machine without writing to the blockchain. It’s incomplete at the moment, because it does not support transactions.
Native lists cannot be unbounded, for similar reasons of cost. So Alex also wrote an “endless list” that is essentially a linked list of bounded lists, so you can treat it as an unbounded list but you are only acting on the portions of list that you are currently looking at.
He then wrote code that can be used for redistributing money from a group of donors to a large group without having to use existing infrastructure like Paypal – because organizations like Paypal don’t like it when individuals send money to lots of people. This was inspired by some work that was done based on US stimulus cheques – individuals got cheques from the government, but not all of them needed them, and plenty of people needed more than the stimulus cheque provided. This allowed a group of donors to store money in the contract itself, in a way that is transparent to everyone; and then it to be distributed out to a set of recipients.
There’s more information at https://community.blockstack.org/clarity-winners.
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Reece talked about the latest improvements to his IntelliJ IDEA XQuery plugin. It now shows inline parameter names on function calls, and shows the function structure. It also displays documentation for functions from MarkLogic or from the standard XQuery and XPath libraries – it will download the documentation.
It will also show a query log in a tab for the various MarkLogic log files, so you can see the latest log messages without viewing a separate file. This works for both local log files, and for remote MarkLogic servers.
It will parse MarkLogic rewriter XML files, and display the results as a list of REST endpoints. In the upcoming version, it will automatically retrieve all the registered MarkLogic schemas, so for the rewriter.xml it provides auto-complete for the various structural elements and options in the rewriter XML. It also parses RestXQ APIs as used in systems like BaseX.
It will handle relative imports correctly if you set an XQuery directory as a source root – so “/myLibraries/whatever.xqy” will resolve to the right place. In the upcoming version, it will be able to recognize these automatically.
When you’re executing queries locally using a configured query processor (e.g. if you’ve configured MarkLogic or another system so you can do the local equivalent of using the MarkLogic console), then you can pretty-print the output and you can also see profiling information for the code that you execute.
Reece is currently working on debug support, so you can set breakpoints in your XQuery code.
Inigo stated that Reece’s plugin is great, and that everyone using XQuery or MarkLogic should be using it.