Pyret – A language exploring scripting and functional programming

Post by natec425 » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

good_gnu wrote: post #56

For me, this looks MUCH more like Haskell than Python and I think that this is symptomatic of an erroneous claim that some functional programming proponents seem to constantly make: That declarative, "mathy","deconstructive" programming is somehow easier to learn than imperative, "algorithmic", step-by-step constructive programming. In reality, most people in the world struggle with abstract mathematics and find it m…

Post by lmm » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

makmanalp wrote: post #13

mattangriffel wrote: post #4

As 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…

Annotations are optional. This is equally valid: fun square(n): n * n end Not that different after all! And I say this as a lover of python and significant whitespace, but not having it at first would be easier.

Post by jswrenn » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #29

Unexplained 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?

  > num-sqrt(4.41)
  21/10

  > num-sqrt(2)
  ~1.4142135623730951

Post by AstralStorm » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

xbeta wrote: post #64

Yet another language - excuse for my lack of context/background, but why? If you go into a job now, how many will expect you to code in Pyret? Don't get me wrong, I love learning new languages and every language does give me a slightly different perspective when it comes to programming. It sometimes change how I think in my mind to code. But do we need a new language just for the sake of someone wants to write a new…

Post by kazinator » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

cygned wrote: post #26

danso wrote: post #14

Example 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…

As a Clojure programmer, I learned to love hyphens, so much more readable. But since Clojure is a Lisp, is does not suffer this whitespace problem/confusion. (- a b)