Viewing profile — bslatkin

Contact form here: https://quil.la/FVZ3PMZC Thanks!

Great! Please send it my way so I don't miss it. Thank you

Scala has a lot of interesting concepts in it for sure! The problem is that the JVM is a deal-breaker, either because of its complexity or because of the associated licensing risk.…

For a very simple, single-expression lambda function I agree you don't need an explicit return. Even Python skips the "return" for lambdas. But for anything more complex, I find ex…

Let me know if you'd like to give it a shot to see how gunky it is!

Thank you. I think you've basically summarized the approach! If you have any specific guidance to that end please send me an email or DM with details :)

Let's keep going with the building analogy. You're running a cabinet making company. You've got all kinds of hand tools and power tools. You build jigs to make certain repetitive t…

I understand what you mean. But I expect most potential users want explicit returns because they're familiar and more approachable for beginners.

I think Spark is a good example of where the functional paradigm has done well in a niche.

It's SSA. If you use (define) in Racket is it no longer functional?

I'm not an Elixir expert at all, but one important feature I believe is missing: explicit returns.

How should an early return if statement work instead?

Agreed that seeing structure is important. I mean operating on it at a higher level like https://calva.io/paredit/

I love to swing a hammer as much as the next programmer. But if you offer me a nail gun, even with slightly lower precision, I will happily use it the majority of the time and reve…

I've got a working interpreter and compiler for the initial language. I've had a few people take it for a spin and they were able to rapidly learn it and start contributing, despit…

Some parentheses languages are much easier to use if you're familiar with a structural editor, for example.

The conversation happened in ~2008. Julia has a lot of great ideas in it for sure. Why hasn't it gotten more popular?

It's true and that is one of the largest challenges. Producing something that feels familiar (but not error prone) has been the way I've solved such conflicts so far.

I'm sorry to make you wait.

Great examples. Another question that leads to frustration is "can I use my existing code editor for this"? People are turned off when the answer is "no"

Exactly.

It's an unpaid personal open source project.

Thanks! Right now the language's codebase is about 50KLOC. There's an interpreter for fast iteration and a compiler built on LLVM for producing native binaries. I'd like to make mo…

Thank you! Imagine everything we like about Python, remove some warts, make it functional. It should feel familiar and appealing to a Python programmer.