← Back to context

Comment by jwilber

18 hours ago

Will never not complain about languages not giving code examples. It’s like writing a charting/UI/style library and showing no examples. Just what?

You overlooked the examples. They might not satisfy you, but there are examples.

  • To be fair, the examples are extremely easy to overlook. They are also, to put it delicately, not the most helpful.

    • The examples are fine for an early-stage poc project like this one. `minutes` with evaluation trace and `[Fold]<-` are illustrative, and if you work them out with pen and paper, you can get a good grasp on the main ideas of the language. That you have to search for them on a page that looks like a slightly-formatted README instead of having a nice scrollable with syntax-highlighted snippets at the top is because this IS a slightly-formatted README - and that's also completely fine at this stage. What's important is that there are a few interesting concepts there and that it was published. Even if this one fizzles, as 99.999% of languages do, that doesn't matter if some other language down the line gets inspired by those concepts.

    • Absolutely agree. But fairness precludes denying the existence of examples.

      They are not prominent, but they are in a section with the heading 'Examples'.

if it's something you do 100% of the time, is it really adding any information to the world?

  • absolutely does! for a new language that no one has heard of, it is essential that examples make at least a parallel with other languages. providing examples for mundane things is very useful to build the understanding with the reader who hasn't been writing a paper on OM language.