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Comment by plainOldText

2 days ago

This language seems to be aiming high. Congrats!

Looking at their code however, I'm realizing one thing Elixir got "right", in my view, is the order of arguments in function calls.

For example, in Elixir to retrieve the value associated with a key in a map, you would write Map.get(map, key) or Map.get(map, key, default).

This feels so natural, particularly when you chain the operations using the pipe operator (|>):

  map
  |> Map.put(key, value)
  |> Map.get(key)

In Flix it seems one needs to write Map.get(x, map), Map.insert(x, y, map). I guess it follows in the footsteps of F#.

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plainOldText

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jorkadeen  2 days ago

But in Flix you can write:

  def main(): Unit \ IO = 
      Map.empty() |>
      Map.insert("Hello", "World") |>
      Map.get("Hello") |>
      println

So I am not sure what you mean? In general, if you like pipelines then you want the "subject" (here the map) to be the last argument. That is how it is in Flix.

  • plainOldText  2 days ago

    Sorry, I wasn't clear. Yes, you can have pipelines in Flix, F#, OCaml, to me however placing the "subject" first feels more natural, as function signatures (not necessarily in pipelines) have a symmetry not encountered otherwise:

    Subject First:

      Map.put(map, key, value)
  Map.get(map, key)
  Map.get(map, key, default)
  Map.del(map, key)

    Subject Last:

      Map.put(key, value, map)
  Map.get(key, map)
  Map.get(key, default, map)
  Map.del(key, map)