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

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

#41

Post by zephyrfalcon »

publicfig wrote: post #35
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…

What do you think makes Python more difficult to learn now than it used to be? It seems to me that there are even more tutorials now. Also, the confusion between learning 2.7 or 3+ is pretty much completely gone at this point, while the base core of the language remains as simple and readable as the older version in my opinion.

I don't think the number of tutorials matters, otherwise Haskell monads would be super easy to learn. ;-)

Python circa 2000 was a language that was easy to learn. [1] What you saw was basically what you got. Python in 2018... well... it has grown lots more features, which might not show up in tutorials but a beginner will see them as soon as they look at actual code. List comprehensions, generators, context managers, metaclasses, async/await, decorators, 2/3 split, ABCs, etc. Useful? Yes. Easy to learn or understand for a newbie? Maybe not so much.

Never mind that setting up an environment is no longer as easy as creating a 'lib' directory somewhere in $PYTHONPATH and unzipping files in there. Now we have many package managers, virtual environments, competing Python versions, you name it. Back in the day I started a Python "project" with a single file and worked from there, growing as necessary. Nowadays I see new projects with a dozen files and directories. Again, there are (presumably) reasons for all this, but easier it certainly is not.

[1] Although even then the "Programming Python" book was like 900 pages... http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565921979.do

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

#42

Post by thrower123 »

Kaveren wrote: post #8

I think there's more value to be had in building better learning resources around programming languages than continually trying to simplify them at the expense of power. Besides that, if someone is already looking for a simple scripting language, Lua already exists. I personally prefer its syntax as well.

Lua really is a nice little language. I do wish it had 0-based arrays like everything else in common use though.

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

#44

Post by zephyrfalcon »

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?

A few things come to mind... Installing it. Setting up a project. Learning the whole language. Reading other people's code. Understanding how things work behind the scenes. Less surprising code, in the sense that it does what you expect.

I would add, "finding a third-part library", but that was mostly because there were not as many. :) Then again the current glut of libraries is a bit of mixed blessing. I can look for a library that does X and find dozens of them. Very few of them will be mature or do what I want. But that has more to do with the ecosystem than with Python-the-language.

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

#46

Post by keymone »

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".

what about https://www.python.org/shell/ and bajillion more resources on the web?

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

#47

Post by vanderZwan »

sephware wrote: post #33
mediumdeviation wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Jevon's Paradox [1] applied to the browser, where increasing the efficiency in which the browser can be scripted paradoxically causes websites to become slower and harder to build. Not because JavaScript itself (or any of the libraries built on top it) got worse, but because by allowing developers the ability to script more and more complex applications, sites became slower, and developer tools became heavier to…

That sounds similar to Wirth’s Law. In general the more efficient a computer’s hardware is, the more bloated its software will be, so the slower the whole system will run.

While certainly related, I think GP was suggesting more that the same idea also applies to ease of development rather than raw hardware power.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

dave84 wrote: post #40
rounce wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> However, the moment you dip into libraries you are dependent on someone else's work. >Like every other programming language? The lack of a standard library means you'll be dipping in a lot sooner.

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by vanderZwan »

arayh wrote: post #45

Nice work! I would love it if we could get something like a codepen.io for this language, so we could share and debug code with people learning to program.

Look under "More Features" of the main website[0][1].

> kabas.online can be opened passing a programm within an URL parameter

If the author of the language reads this: you could try shortening the URL with LZString[2].

[0] https://kabas.online/main.html

[1] https://kabas.online/run.html?title=Run&code=sz%20%3D%20100%....

[2] http://pieroxy.net/blog/pages/lz-string/index.html

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

bartread wrote: post #27
nine_k wrote: post #7

The original Javascript was intended as an easy language that runs in the browser. And so it was in 1996. In reality, it seems, a successful language that runs in the browser had no way around becoming a "full-blown" language, as opposed to "easy".

JavaScript still can be easy if you ignore the rest of the ecosystem. Thing is, sooner or later, at the very least you find yourself wanting something like lodash or jQuery[1]. Ironically, the latter also came into existence to make programming across different browsers simpler back in the bad old days (of not that long ago), and did an admirable job of that. Unfortunately jQuery, and similar libraries of the mid-nou…

[deleted]
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