Chapter 1: Exploring Bosque

The Bosque project was born from Mark Marron's work, where he questioned the accidental complexity that exists in programming languages nowadays. He proposed a new programming language design that eliminated the factors of this complexity in terms of loops, recursion, mutable state, and reference equality, among others, thus resulting in a new paradigm called Regularized Programming.

Bosque has a syntax inspired by TypeScript and adopts semantics from ML and JavaScript, giving rise to a programming language that is easy to write and read.

The simplicity of Bosque allows programmers who decide to adopt Bosque to focus on the core of the problem without worrying about the errors that are caused by the language's accidental complexity. Consequently, they will build more reliable, robust, and predictable programs that have been prepared, by design, to support new trends.

In this chapter, we will cover the basics of what the Bosque project is, as well as some of the theory and motivation behind this project. We will also learn the basics of code intermediate representations (IR). We will learn what they are, why we need them, and what the Bosque approach is. We will also review the problem of accidental complexity and present the concept of regularized programming. Eventually, we will mention where Bosque can be applied.

We will cover the following topics:

• Identifying the need for another language
• Learning what intermediate representation is
• Discovering regularized programming
• Understanding accidental complexity
• How the experiment is going so far
• Bosque applications

By the end of this chapter, you will have knowledge about what Bosque really is and how it works.