Bosque (programming language)

Bosque

Paradigm	Multi-paradigm: functional, typed language
Designed by	Mark Marron
Developer	Microsoft
First appeared	March 3, 2019 (2019-03-03)
License	MIT License
Filename extensions	.bsq
Website	www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/bosque-programming-language/
Influenced by
JavaScript, TypeScript, ML

Bosque is a free and open-source programming language designed & developed by Microsoft that was inspired by the syntax and types of TypeScript and the semantics of ML and Node/JavaScript. Design goals for the language include better software quality and improved developer productivity.

Overview

Bosque was designed by Microsoft Research computer scientist Mark Marron, who describes the language as an effort to move beyond the structured programming model that became popular in the 1970s.

The structured programming paradigm, in which flow control is managed with loops, conditionals, and subroutines, became popular after a 1968 paper titled "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" by computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. Marron believes we can do better by getting rid of sources of complexity like loops, mutable state, and reference equality. The result is Bosque, which represents a programming paradigm that Marron, in a paper he wrote, calls "regularized programming."

The Bosque specification, parser, type checker, reference interpreter, and IDE support are licensed under MIT License and available on GitHub.

Examples

Add two numbers

function add2(x: Int, y: Int): Int {
    return x + y;
}

add2(2, 3)     // 5
add2(x=2, y=3) // 5
add2(y=2, 5)   // 7

See also

• Dafny
• F* (programming language)
• Free software movement

Further reading

• Mark Marron (2019). "Regularized Programming with the BOSQUE Language" (PDF). Microsoft Research.
• Kaczmarek, Sebastian; Ibaceta, Joel (2021). Learn Bosque Programming: Discover the world's first regularized programming language. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1839211973.

External links

• Bosque Programming Language - Microsoft Research
• GitHub - microsoft/BosqueLanguage: The Bosque programming language is an experiment in regularized design for a machine assisted rapid and reliable software development lifecycle.