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Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

kabas.online

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Re: Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

#51

Post by vanderZwan »

chkas wrote: post #30
Aardwolf wrote: post #2

Nice! It would be more fitting for the style of this language if 'end' were used instead of '.' imho

`end` as block delimiter makes much noise. Python code looks clean because it only uses indentations to delimit blocks. But this makes it at least difficult to refactor the code and to reformat it automatically.

I'm not sure why you are downvoted. Your statement is just an opinion, but it's your language and you are perfectly entitled to aesthetic judgements like that.

The . kind of reminds me of Smalltalk, which uses it to end statements (instead of the ; we all know from other languages at the time)

Re: Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

#52

Post by pbhjpbhj »

wowtip wrote: post #26
thanatropism wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python? Python is really easy to learn and has reached VB levels of snowball network effects.

But even Python requires installing the dev environment etc. I can see the use for this, for throwing people with no experience into "coding right away".

There are REPLs online.

If you just apt-install IDLE I think you can be up and running very quickly. I did a relatively thorough survey when I first started learning python a couple of years ago and found PyCharm simpler for the course I was doing -- basic text handling, and a little CLI based interactive stuff.

Re: Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

#53

Post by cribbles »

chkas wrote: post #15
goodstuff9 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BASIC ?

BASIC was the inspiration.

My first thought (before seeing this comment) was that it reminded me of my first programming language, the TI-BASIC that shipped with Texas Instruments graphic calculators in the US. :)

Re: Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

#54

Post by mbel »

chkas wrote: post #11

What's under the hood? The source code is parsed to an AST , which is then executed. It began with a Java-Applet . When WebAssembly appeared, I ported it to C++ with a JS/HTML interface and added graphics. Recently I converted the C++ part to C , which halved the size of the wasm file.

> Recently I converted the C++ part to C, which halved the size of the wasm file.

So you are saying that "costless" abstractions of C++ actually had some cost? Who would have thought.

Re: Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

#56

Post by jerf »

thanatropism wrote: post #39
jerf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... it was easy to learn. It really isn't easy to fully learn it as it used to be. I think there's a fundamental gulf between "easy language" and one that you'd want to do work in long term, and the history of Python is a great case study in that. If there aren't any "easy, real languages", well, if you want to fix that you'd better carefully study the reasons why all the easy languages have stopped being easy on…

Welp, Python+numerics/stats stack is really messy; new stuff like coroutines can be a mindfuck. But what of what was once easy in Python is now harder? Parentheses after print statements?

"It really isn't easy to fully learn it as it used to be."

If you carve out the Python 2.0-ish subset and taught a class on that, it would be as easy as it ever was. But if your students take that knowledge and go to the Django tutorial, they're going to find themselves missing several concepts, and Django doesn't even use everything in Python, being rather old itself.

That said, I still think I'd rather take a Python 2.0-ish subset and teach students that, than give them some new custom language that they can't expand on or use in the field. Python 2.0-ish is still pretty useful and there's a clean upgrade track if you do want to continue down that road. And even the latest Python is still, at worst, middle-of-the-pack on language difficulty, if not still trending towards the easy side in the list of top 10-20 languages. But it's definitely a non-trivial upgrade path now.

Re: Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

#57

Post by pmarreck »

rounce wrote: post #36
MrEfficiency wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confirming. Javascript is really cool when you learn it. However, the moment you dip into libraries you are dependent on someone else's work. Then you run into a problem because Native doesnt let you use a specific library, and googling your issue recommends that specific library. You use something else, it works alright. Months later you re-write everything anyway.

> However, the moment you dip into libraries you are dependent on someone else's work. Like every other programming language? > Then you run into a problem because Native doesnt let you use a specific library You are confusing runtime and language.

> Like every other programming language?

There are languages which do a much better job of reducing or eliminating possible "blast radius" of a bug in a dependent library. Functional/immutable languages such as Elixir come to mind (for example, you can literally reduce the scope of a library to an individual function). This is not one of those languages.

Re: Show HN: An Easy Programming Language That Runs in the Browser

#58

Post by pmarreck »

vanderZwan wrote: post #51
chkas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`end` as block delimiter makes much noise. Python code looks clean because it only uses indentations to delimit blocks. But this makes it at least difficult to refactor the code and to reformat it automatically.

I'm not sure why you are downvoted. Your statement is just an opinion, but it's your language and you are perfectly entitled to aesthetic judgements like that. The . kind of reminds me of Smalltalk, which uses it to end statements (instead of the ; we all know from other languages at the time)

Erlang also uses the . to end statements.
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