tbh, it looks like ruby with minor changes
Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
31–40 of 272 posts
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#32"We need better languages for introductory computing." and "One of the enduring lessons from the Racket project is that no full-blown, general-purpose programming language is particularly appropriate for introductory education." Well not really, we need better teachers and methods for teaching programming and computing. A good language on its own is not gonna lift the interest.
> Well not really, we need better teachers and methods for teaching programming and computing.
I think most of the Pyret developers would agree wholeheartedly! To this end, the Pyret development team works closely (and in some cases, overlaps) with Bootstrap [1], a nation-wide program to teach programming to middle school students. The feedback we get from these teachers (and the process of teaching teachers) directly informs language design.
Furthermore, at Brown University, where many of Pyret's developers have ties, Pyret is dogfooded on two courses: an "Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science" [2] and "Programming Languages" [3].
(Disclosure: I am a developer of Pyret.)
[1] http://www.bootstrapworld.org/ [2] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs019/2016/ [3] https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2016/
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#33I'm somewhat confused by the indentation rules. Is this code valid? fun abc(d): d+1 end
Yes, Pyret is totally indentation-insensitive.
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#34What's the point? One would hope they start with a description of why this is better for education than something like Python. I just gave it a quick glance, and it looks like many other programming languages - a bunch of odd text gibberish. I don't think the problem dividing people into "gets it" and "doesn't get it" has anything to do with nuances in syntax or semantics.
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#35No offense but I really don't think it's a good idea to teach beginners a language with such a goofy syntax. It's fine if you want to make a language with a unique and "innovative" syntax. But beginners are best served by learning something mainstream, and ideally simple. They can expand into crazy stuff as they are ready for new languages.
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#36As someone who teaches coding to beginners for a living (I founded One Month and I teach Python to business students at Columbia University), this language looks really intimidating to beginners. Maybe Pyret isn't for beginners, and it's intended to teach people who already have some basic knowledge more advanced concepts like functional programming. That's fine. But to a total beginner, the syntax of Pyret is defini…
In the same world is easier to understand for advanced developers.
You know n is a number and the result is a number. You don't need to "type check in your head".
Remember Pascal? Being explicit is good for education and for regular sanity.
P.D: I like python very much, but all the time I'm wondering "ok, what is the meaning of this code, let's find elsewhere so I can remember what is supposed this return"
This also happens to me with F# (type inference is weird: The compiler know, but it hide to me what it know!).
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#37Example from the OP: fun to-celsius(f): (f - 32) * (5 / 9) end What's the justification for allowing the use of hyphens/dashes in reference names, when underscores would seemingly provide the same purpose? One of the most common problems I notice in newbie code is inconsistency in using whitespace, e.g. `a-b` vs `a - b`, though in that situation, for Python and virtually every other language I've used, those both res…
Hyphens are much better for names than underscores, and easier to type.
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#38As someone who teaches coding to beginners for a living (I founded One Month and I teach Python to business students at Columbia University), this language looks really intimidating to beginners. Maybe Pyret isn't for beginners, and it's intended to teach people who already have some basic knowledge more advanced concepts like functional programming. That's fine. But to a total beginner, the syntax of Pyret is defini…
Can we stop assuming that only the syntaxes we are accustomed to are the only "readable" options?
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#39When I was student, my favorite language syntax was Caml, the ancestor of OCaml. I am surprise there was comparison with many languages but not OCaml.
I was also surprised. The syntax they use is basically Standard ML. Also I'd really like to see a paper on their static type checking, because they mix objects and algebraic data types, which is not trivial at all.
Hi, I'm actually the person who wrote the static type checker. Essentially we get around the difficulties of mixing objects and ADTs by having very limited support for subtyping. This way we can still carry out unification-based inference. The subtyping bounds are not propagated during unification so we don't need to worry about calculating closures. This does mean that type inference is incomplete with respect to subtyping, but I haven't found a satisfactory system that would let us do otherwise.
I would also like to note that we do also have a new feature where types can be inferred if you provide tests in a "where:" block attached to a function. This infers a function's type solely from the examples of usage provided.
If you have any other questions feel free to ask!
Re: Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming
#40Unexplained important things: * concurrency, is there any nice built in syntax like Python async? Any kind of threading? Multiprocessing support? * error handling, how is it done? Where are exceptions? * standard and file io, string operations, serialisation? * no builtin higher math types (matrix etc.), is math done on decimal floating point numbers? * foreign functions, interfacing with other languages, embedding?
Judging from the red/blue colors in the logo and that the website was generated with Frog, I assume that once you feel too big for Pyret's shoes you'll discover that you've actually been using Racket all along and will start using the Racket language directly.