"A variable name can contain any UTF-8 symbols (except special ones, white-spaces; the leading character cannot be a digit) and is case-sensitive." This is terrible.
How is this terrible? Isn't this pretty standard in all big languages?
The Elena Programming Language
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Re: The Elena Programming Language
#32"A variable name can contain any UTF-8 symbols (except special ones, white-spaces; the leading character cannot be a digit) and is case-sensitive." This is terrible.
How is this terrible? Isn't this pretty standard in all big languages?
I know you can use emoji as variables in Ruby. Unsure if you can in Python.
Imo it's fine to allow Unicode. Latin will still be the de facto standard character set, but it allows international users to code natively and allows for Easter eggs.
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#33"A variable name can contain any UTF-8 symbols (except special ones, white-spaces; the leading character cannot be a digit) and is case-sensitive." This is terrible.
Doesn't Python 3 exactly do this? Not saying I would use non-ascii characters in variable names but presumably populations that don't use the Latin alphabet have different use cases?
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#34Is there anyone that doesn’t immediately scroll past the elevator pitch to the code examples when looking at a new language?
Absolutely, No one here thinks you're Steve Jobs. Just show me your little toy pet project example code to convince me it's slightly less useless than the 10 other ones that get posted here everyday.
There's no need to be this harsh. We should always celebrate people making things even if they don't benefit us directly, to me that's even the essence of hacking
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this terrible? Isn't this pretty standard in all big languages?
I know you can use emoji as variables in Ruby. Unsure if you can in Python. Imo it's fine to allow Unicode. Latin will still be the de facto standard character set, but it allows international users to code natively and allows for Easter eggs.
Since PEP 3131 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3131/) Python supports unicode in names, but only letters, not emoji. I have occasionally used variable names like ϕ when transcribing a formula in toy code.
The unicode is normalized. That can be used for trickery in rare circumstances. "global" is a keyword, but "𝐠𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥" isn't, so you can use that if you absolutely require an attribute called "global".
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears that the procedure to sign up is to go to IRC and ask for an invite.
The point is also to vouch for someone when an invite is sent. At least in my mind, as in it's officially done, if the invitee misbehaves, it's kind of the responsibility of the inviter. Every profile has who invited who.
Then how does the inviter know, that they can vouch for the invitee? Perhaps no one there knows me. Why would anyone vouch for someone they don't know? Wouldn't that make vouching a useless hurdle?
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#37OK, we see a dynamic, late-binding, object-oriented, interpreted language with a VM. If I were to try and make this language interesting to the HN audience, I'd start with two items: * What is interesting in Elena, compared to Python? * What is interesting in Elena, compared to ES6? * For bonus points: What is interesting in Elena, compared to Smalltalk? Without answering this questions, I don't see why I should take…
The overview section in the programming manual perhaps answers the bonus question:
> Why not to treat the message like a normal language element with which different operations are possible : loading, passing, modifying, dispatching? Could we do it without using reflection all the way?
I don't know how the guts of smalltalk are implemented, but, if there's a lot of reliance on runtime reflection involved, then maybe there's your answer.
I think, then, that the answer to the first two is, "It's like Smalltalk."
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard a good podcast about pony recently: https://corecursive.com/055-unproven-with-sean-allen-1/ - it’s about how Wallaroo Labs came to use it. They talk about using it to deal with some really interesting engineering challenges. One of the things that I found interesting is their comparison to Rust was that at least at the time Rust didn’t have a comparable runtime to Pony’s high performance actor based one.
It's a shame Pony does not get enough attention as it's a very nice language that as you say, introduces truly innovative ideas. I wrote some code in it and it was extremely fast, in the same order of magnitude as Rust/C. But it was quite complex to write, unfortunately, compared to the Rust version (which also guarantees no deadlocks and safe concurrency). On the other hand, the code looked quite a lot prettier due…
Any language with an explicit `end` keyword can't claim beautiful Python-like syntax :P
Pony is still pretty cool though
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just so you know, it appears you've been shadow banned. No idea why. I would suggest joining lobste.rs, an HN clone built out of frustration of HN's lack of transparency on banning.
Lobster needs invite for registration, does it not? That has prevented me from signing up there in the past. I do not want to beg for an invite.
I begged for an invite a while back and nothing happened, they just said "try and hang around [on the irc channel] for a while, maybe"
not sure what the secret entry requirements are for that club or what the point is
Re: The Elena Programming Language
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lobster needs invite for registration, does it not? That has prevented me from signing up there in the past. I do not want to beg for an invite.
I begged for an invite a while back and nothing happened, they just said "try and hang around [on the irc channel] for a while, maybe" not sure what the secret entry requirements are for that club or what the point is
I've seen a few people on HN offer invites to other users after a conversation regarding the site. I've also seen lobste.rs threads where users suggest preventing new users from joining and even suggesting deleting existing users so they can preserve whatever perceived superiority their site has, so I don't expect them to be very open in general.