The purpose of Hyperlambda is to have a programming language that allows your computer to generate most of your code. However, sometimes you need to manually modify the generated code yourself, and/or create Hyperlambda code manually, at which point you'll need to understand Hyperlambda. Hyperlambda is extremely easy to learn though, and you can probably teach yourself most of its basics in less than 10 minutes. This article is an introduction to Hyperlambda and gives you an overview of Hyperlambda from a bird's perspective. Structure Syntactically Hyperlambda resembles YAML, however, it has its own unique syntax, and even though it has the same readability traits as YAML, it is the same. In theory, we could have used YAML, JSON, or XML to create Hyperlambda, but that would increase its verbosity, resulting in more difficult-to-read code. However, its structure is easily understood in 5 minutes, since it is literally just a text representation of a tree structure. Hyperlambda's structure is based upon , and each node has 3 properties. not "nodes" Name Value Children To illustrate imagine the following Hyperlambda. .data foo1:bar1 foo2:bar2 The above Hyperlambda consists of 3 nodes. The first node is called . This node has two children called and . Both of these nodes have a value each being and . The colon separates the node's name and its value, and 3 spaces opens up the children collection. To play around with Hyperlambda you can use Magic's component. Below is a screenshot of a slightly more complex example. [.data] [foo1] [foo2] "bar1" "bar2" "Evaluator" The above example is of course more complex than our first code snippet, but it still follows the exact same structure being name/value/children. In the above example, the node is given two children arguments; One condition node being its parts, and another lambda object being its parts. The loop will execute its object for as long as its condition is true. The condition again is an condition, implying . Translating the above Hyperlambda to English hence becomes the following. [while] [lt] [.lambda] [while] [.lambda] [lt] "less than" Execute .lambda while .no has a value less than 20 Inside we're creating a log entry before we increment the value. Magic contains many similar conditions, such as , , etc - In addition to a lot of additional . Refer to the for an exhaustive list. [.lambda] [.no] "more than" "equal" "keywords" magic.lambda documentation Code is data The reasons why Hyperlambda is so good at creating and modifying code, is because there is no difference in Hyperlambda between and - Implying code data. The same way we can modify data structures such as XML, YAML, or the HTML DOM for that matter, Hyperlambda allows for modifying its code. If you want to change the invocation to in the above screenshot to this is as easy as adding the following Hyperlambda to the top of your code. "code" "data" is [ ] log.info [log.error] set-name:x:../**/log.info .:log.error This trait of Hyperlambda makes it very easy to create , that somehow changes an existing snippet of code to do something completely different. This trait of Hyperlambda is crucial for its ability to automatically generate code and is the reason why it can with such ease create and generate code 100% automatically for you. When you think about Hyperlambda is, please understand its for being weird. Hyperlambda's allows us to easily create templated snippets of code that we use as the foundation for some process automatically generating custom code, by parametrizing our code dynamically, such that we can modify it according to our specific needs. "self evolving code" "how weird" reasons "weirdness" Everything is code The natural realization of the above is that all data is also code. This creates a problem for us since we might want to create nodes we don't want to . This is achieved by starting a node's name with a . This instructs the Hyperlambda execution engine that this node should not be executed but simply ignored by the Hyperlambda execution engine. This is what allows us to create , and/or nodes containing . You can see examples of such nodes in our previous code snippets and screenshots. "execute" "." "variables" "data" Expressions Hyperlambda doesn't have . This is because is a variable in Hyperlambda, including function invocations, arguments to functions, etc. This creates a problem for us, being that we need some mechanism to modify node names, node values, and their children collection. This is where expressions comes into the picture. An expression allows us to reference any node in our Hyperlambda object. An example of such an expression can be seen in the above screenshot where our invocation to has the value of . Its part declares it as an expression , while the part is the actual expression. An expression is similar to chained LINQ statements in that it is a list of objects, that reacts upon each other in a chain. Below is a slightly more complex expression to illustrate the point. "variables" everything [get-value] :x:@.no :x: type @.no IEnumerable .data foo1:bar1 foo2:bar2 foo3:bar3 set-value:x:../*/.data/*/foo2 .:Hyperlambda was here If you execute the above Hyperlambda in your Magic's component, you will see it changes the value to . This is because the expression we give our invocation basically says the following. "Evaluator" "bar2" "Hyperlambda was here" [set-value] Give me the root node, then all its children, then filter away everything not having the name of '.data', find its children again, and filter away everything not having the name of 'foo2' When the expression is done filtering our nodes, we're left with only the node, at which point changes its value. To understand expressions and type declarations in Hyperlambda you might benefit from reading about diving deeper into both expressions, iterators, and Hyperlambda's typing system. However, think of expressions as , where each pointer is composed from a chain of , where each iterator is separated by a slash (/), and your expression as a whole can point to zero or more nodes. [foo2] [set-value] magic.node "pointers into your Hyperlambda object" "iterators" Slots Hyperlambda doesn't really understand the idea of function invocations. Instead everything is a in Hyperlambda. However, for all practical concerns a is similar to a function invocation in a traditional programming language. Magic contains hundreds of slots for all sorts of scenarios, and in the documentation for Magic we often refer to these using square brackets in text. To modify parts of your Hyperlambda the following slots are your most important friends. "slot" "slot" bold - Changes the value of one or more nodes [set-value] - Changes the name of one or more nodes [set-name] - Adds a bunch of children to some node [add] - Inserts a bunch of nodes some node [insert-before] before - Inserts a bunch of nodes some node [insert-after] after - Removes nodes [remove-nodes] By combining the above slots you have everything you need to be able to change your Hyperlambda objects as they are executing, resulting in a Turing complete programming language, even though it technically doesn't have neither functions nor variables. To see which slots are available you can click on Windows or on a Mac while your code editor has focus to open the autocomplete drop down. Below is a screenshot of the autocomplete drop down from Hyper IDE. CTRL+SPACE FN+CONTROL+SPACE Snippets Magic's component contains a lot of Hyperlambda snippets illustrating some aspect of Hyperlambda. If you click the button you can load existing Hyperlambda snippets demonstrating some aspect of the programming language for you. The easiest way to start learning Hyperlambda is probably to go through these snippets, understand what they do, for then to apply similar constructs in your own Hyperlambda. The loop in the first screenshot in this article is one example of such a snippet. You can also save your own snippets as you're playing around with Hyperlambda. is a video where I demonstrate Hyperlambda and what you can achieve with it. "Evaluator" "Load" [while] Here Orchestration Hyperlambda is an . This implies that it is a super high-level language, intended for programming building blocks. For these reasons some would argue it's not a programming language, which would be a correct assessment. If you're creating quick sort functionality or polygon rendering algorithms in Hyperlambda, you're doing something wrong. Hyperlambda is intended for algorithm-heavy snippets, even though technically it possible to implement anything in it. To understand Hyperlambda's position, realize its purpose is to sit between your algorithm-heavy low-level code, and the client, your low-level building blocks, giving you dynamic capabilities on your code as a whole. "orchestration programming language" "orchestrating" "real" not is "orchestrating" Hyperlambda is for your code the same as YAML is for your pipelines, configurations, and Kubernetes cluster, in that it allows you to your code together, using declarative concepts, from a high-level abstraction layer, where you don't have to think about the internal details of your executing code. However, where YAML allows you to configure the deployment of your applications, Hyperlambda allows you to your application instead of manually coding it using low-level programming languages such as C# or Java. "configure" "configure" However, when that's said, the entirety of Magic is actually created in Hyperlambda, implying its middleware, the IDE, the SQL editor, in fact, including the crudifier - And you can actually find this code inside your folder if you're using Hyper IDE to check out its code. If you're using heavy recursion, lots of nested while loops, and dozens of temporary variables in your Hyperlambda code, you would probably be better creating this part of your code in C# and exposing your C# code as a to your middleware instead. everything "system" "high level slot" Download Magic, everything is Open Source Also Published Here
