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docs: add language philosophy document and compiler integration

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Write comprehensive PHILOSOPHY.md covering Lux's six core principles
(explicit over implicit, composition over configuration, safety without
ceremony, practical over academic, one right way, tools are the language)
with detailed comparisons against JS/TS, Python, Rust, Go, Java/C#,
Haskell/Elm, and Gleam/Elixir. Includes tooling audit and improvement
suggestions.

Add `lux philosophy` command to the compiler, update help screen with
abbreviated philosophy, and link from README.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Brandon Lucas
2026-02-18 10:19:29 -05:00
parent 4909ff9fff
commit 2ae2c132e5
3 changed files with 508 additions and 9 deletions
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README.md
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A functional programming language with first-class effects, schema evolution, and behavioral types.
## Vision
## Philosophy
Most programming languages treat three critical concerns as afterthoughts:
**Make the important things visible.**
1. **Effects** — What can this code do? (Hidden, untraceable, untestable)
2. **Data Evolution** — Types change, data persists. (Manual migrations, runtime failures)
3. **Behavioral Properties** — Is this idempotent? Does it terminate? (Comments and hope)
Most languages hide what matters most: what code can do (effects), how data changes over time (schema evolution), and what guarantees functions provide (behavioral properties). Lux makes all three first-class, compiler-checked language features.
Lux makes these first-class language features. The compiler knows what your code does, how your data evolves, and what properties your functions guarantee.
| Principle | What it means |
|-----------|--------------|
| **Explicit over implicit** | Effects in types — see what code does |
| **Composition over configuration** | No DI frameworks — effects compose naturally |
| **Safety without ceremony** | Type inference + explicit signatures where they matter |
| **Practical over academic** | Familiar syntax, ML semantics, no monads |
| **One right way** | Opinionated formatter, integrated tooling, built-in test framework |
| **Tools are the language** | `lux fmt/lint/check/test/compile` — one binary, not seven tools |
See [docs/PHILOSOPHY.md](./docs/PHILOSOPHY.md) for the full philosophy with language comparisons and design rationale.
## Core Principles