Fearless: Zero to Hero

Preface: What is Fearless?

Let's start with a cryptic definition:

Fearless is a minimalist, nominally-typed, object-oriented programming language. Fearless gives the programmer fine control of side effects using Reference and Object Capabilities instead of an Effect System.

If you are new to programming, the sentence above was probably incomprehensible. Don't worry - we will unpack these ideas piece by piece and build understanding through examples.

Often programming is taught as a tool to reach a practical goal, like building a website, a video-game, or automating a task. That is, programming is often dressed as a necessary hurdle to "get over with" so you can achieve something else. We aim to move beyond treating programming as an obstacle.

We see programming as an artistic expression demanding abstract thinking, focused concentration, and persistence in problem-solving. These are muscles that grow stronger with practice. Programmers find intrinsic satisfaction in the process of careful logical construction itself.

The Illusion of Progress: The Monkey and the Pedestal

There is a philosophy of innovation often cited by the "moonshot" teams at Google X. They propose a hypothetical challenge: suppose you want to teach a monkey to recite Shakespeare while standing on a pedestal. How should you allocate your time and money?

Most people start by building the pedestal. Why? Because building a pedestal is easy. You can go to a workshop, buy some wood, glue it together, and by the end of the day, you have a tangible object. You can show it to your boss and say, "Look, I made progress! I have the pedestal." This provides a dopamine hit. It provides the perception of progress.

However, teaching a monkey to recite Shakespeare is incredibly hard. It might even be impossible. If you spend six months building the most beautiful marble pedestal, only to discover you cannot teach the monkey to speak, you have wasted six months. You haven't actually de-risked the project at all.

Tackling the Hard Part First

To actually solve the problem, you must ignore the pedestal entirely and focus all your energy on the monkey. You must tackle the hardest, riskiest part of the problem first. Only when the monkey is reciting Hamlet does it make sense to invest a single minute in building the pedestal. In learning to program, "the pedestal" is often the tooling, the installation, the "Hello World" printed to a console, or the simple imperative scripts that feel like magic but crumble under complexity. These things give you the perception of progress without the foundational understanding required to build complex systems.

This guide refuses to build the pedestal first. We will not start with the easy scripts that feel like magic but crumble under complexity. We aim to teach you how to model the world and construct logic from first principles. We are focusing on the monkey. This is why this guide starts with the hard stuff—Types, Abstractions, and Inductive Reasoning—front and centre.

Expect confusion: everything is circularly dependent concepts

If you ever learned a foreign language, you will have started by trying to connect each word in the foreign language to a definition in your native language. We do not have this luck when it comes to programming. Programming is a universe on its own.

Learning programming is a little like learning to speak again from scratch: a child learning to speak has to create a network of concepts in their head; and those concepts circularly depend on each other.

Car <--> Wheels

• Cars have wheels, wheels are the thing cars have.

• Note how we used language in a structured way when we made up the symbol <-->. What does that symbol mean? It means anything we want it to mean, we just made it up. By using it over and over we may solidify its meaning.

Both natural language and programming languages are a web of relationships. The meaning of the terms emerges from how the terms connect with each other.

Fearless programs and Fearless code

A Fearless program consists of a specific form of text, called (source) code. Fearless code is text designed to be read by both humans and a program called Fearless.

When you read text, your brain separates words from punctuation. Reading this sentence below

Pizza, again?

you see two words: Pizza and again, and two punctuation marks: , and ?.

Code works similarly, but everything is just a "token". Fearless would just see four tokens: Pizza, ,, again and ?. From the point of view of Fearless newlines and spaces are irrelevant; any amount of spacing is equally effective at separating pieces of code, and sometimes no spacing is needed, as for the comma after Pizza. This means that we can freely use more or less spacing to make the code more understandable for humans.

Additionally, parenthesis are kinds of tokens that work in pairs: we use parenthesis (..), [..] and {..} to group concepts together.

Comments

Comments are another tool to make our code more readable or clear. A // starts a single-line comment. Fearless ignores everything from // to the end of the line. Any text enclosed by the delimiters /*...*/ is called a multi-line comment. Fearless ignores everything between these two delimiters, even if it spans multiple lines. Comments spaces and newlines have no impact on the execution; but can be precious to insert human-readable explanations in the code; facilitating the understanding of code.

to hold actual compiled code. //OMIT_END

Comments are the first crucial abstraction step we are seeing. Comments are not unique to Fearless and you can use them in any kind of text. Consider the following text, where someone may be planning to apply for their dream Job:

Dear Hiring Manager //actual name?

I am writing to apply for the mattress tester position at Sleep well Inc.
//What about: I am excited to apply for ..

I am a professional /*rester?*/ with 25 years of experience in effective sleeping.
//TODO: connect more with their top requirement
In my current role, I've been able to test
 many different sleeping surfaces.
I can describe a mattress the way sommeliers describe wine: texture, support, finish.
With my extensive experience I'm confident I can provide effective suggestions
to improve the comfort of any kind of sleeping
set up while sticking to a very, very tight budget.
//is sticking the right word?

I have attached my CV and would welcome the chance to discuss how I could contribute to /*...*/
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Kind regards, // or Sincerely?
Bob Snoozeman

As you can see, even comments can have their little language inside: TODO: is a short 5 symbol annotation meaning that there is an open task.

In the next page we will see our first example of code.