Comment by mratsim
1 year ago
After saying that it's a dynamic general-purpose, actor language, the introduction talks about spacing style, comment style, naming and purity.
That's very lackluster. Show me a Fizzbuzz or an advent of code. Tell me a story of why it exists.
Now the only discussion I can have is why are there no reserved words and can we call our functions and variables "set", "call" and "def" then?
This is the spec for the language Douglas Crockford (author of the book "JavaScript: The Good Parts", the JSON specification[1], JSLint[2]) had explained in his famous talk: "The Next Programming Language"[3].
The "big things" in the language are the Actor model, favouring immutability and capabilities-based security.
Presumably, there will be a flashy website later that actually motivates why you should use this language and what's cool about it. Notice this looks similar to the JSON spec website[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
[2] https://www.jslint.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2idkNdKqpQ
[4] https://www.json.org/json-en.html
Thanks for linking the talk, that helped a lot to see where he's coming from.
And makes syntax choices (strictness of spacing that forces verbosity) that instantly guarantees that I will never consider the language.
If you choose language based on syntax instead of semantics you miss everything with useful semantics which doesn't happen to use syntax you're familiar with. That seems a terrible loss.
E.g. I deeply dislike the syntax of makefiles and xslt, but the declarative model is so good where it fits that it's worth dealing with the visual discomfort.
There are more than enough options that there is rarely a compelling reason to suffer. Useful semantics rarely remains confined.
I spent too much time working with syntax to tolerate one that makes the code more time consuming to read or write (and that includes XSL; I worked a lot with XSL, and I'm not doing it again - if I need its semantics I'll implement something to do it with a less insane syntax).
Can you recommend any learning material on XSLT that is not focused on the transform-XML-to-HTML use case?
2 replies →
I think space-style nonsense was a great thing to have up front, because it immediately informed me that I will hate this language and never use it. Genuinely appreciate them saving me time.
I don't get this.
Do you purposely 'not' indent your code, to obfuscate it?
I think they share my distaste of languages (like python) that use indentation instead of brackets to signify a code block. People have different preferences and it's totally valid, whatever the reason for those preferences.
5 replies →