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The melancholy decline of the semicolon

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Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#91

Post by gnufx »

vlmutolo wrote: post #86
zuj wrote: post #77

Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does. (autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)

It's a lot easier to format code arbitrarily when a language is whitespace-independent. For example, to do method chaining across multiple lines, Python requires parentheses around the whole chain. That's a quirk of being a whitespace-dependent language. In general, I think people who advocate for braces and semicolons just find it easier to reason about the code when they know that the formatting doesn't matter. All…

Haskell has an alternative parens-and-braces syntax to the offside rule; that was meant particularly for machine-generated code if I remember correctly.

Edit: I meant to add: you need to decide whether ";" is terminates or joins statements if you have statements in the language.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#92

Post by derbOac »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #60
wruza wrote: post #38

I’ve read some shelves in my life, and from a reader’s perspective a good read has never made me think about what punctuation the author used. This is an inside nonsense which only worries idling writers and critics.

>a good read has never made me think about what punctuation the author used I can with certainty conclude that you have never ever read any Cormac McCarthy or Charles Dickens, and you should, if only to illustrate each extreme of the milieu which you've thus far ignored.

The only certainty about writing rules is that good writers break them.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#93

Post by Causality1 »

bradrn wrote: post #49
Causality1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.

And the sad thing is, they don’t even know what the passive voice is! See G. K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive [ http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html ]. Their unintentional hypocrisy is quite something, e.g.: > … it makes little difference if you decide to look at prose written by the advisers on usage themselves. Consider the beginning of E. B. White's introduction to his revision…

I wonder how much it contributed to the recent rise of present-tense fiction, which I find unpleasant to read.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#94

Post by comeonseriously »

zuj wrote: post #77

Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does. (autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)

There are people who hate python because of the forced indentation. They indent their code in their language of choice, they just don't want something FORCING them to do it.

I'm always flabbergasted at this argument.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#95

Post by seoaeu »

comeonseriously wrote: post #94
zuj wrote: post #77

Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does. (autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)

There are people who hate python because of the forced indentation. They indent their code in their language of choice, they just don't want something FORCING them to do it. I'm always flabbergasted at this argument.

I don’t indent my code, my autoformatter does. It is way less effort to get the braces right and then have the indent level inferred automatically

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#96

Post by bovermyer »

im3w1l wrote: post #9

Sentence length has gone down a lot, it feels like. So really, the semicolon has not been replaced by the dash, but by the period.

I have no data to back this up, but this feels accurate to me.

Anecdotally, I still use the semicolon when I write. Sometimes it just seems like the most natural way to bridge two thoughts.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#98

Post by beardyw »

bsder wrote: post #83
beardyw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29274875#29276377 8 days ago, 3 times.

Erm, at least one of those is unusually wrong: "The doors are not always hidden - they clearly separate these two worlds, and may also led to very nice places that are just not public." Presumably a typo.

True, and one of the others is mine - not really sure I can claim I read it! Still ... one.

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#99

Post by post-it »

zuj wrote: post #77

Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does. (autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)

In Rust, a block that ends with an expression without a semicolon returns that expression. It lets you write terse things like

    let x = if y { a } else { b }

Re: The melancholy decline of the semicolon

#100

Post by comeonseriously »

seoaeu wrote: post #95
comeonseriously wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who hate python because of the forced indentation. They indent their code in their language of choice, they just don't want something FORCING them to do it. I'm always flabbergasted at this argument.

I don’t indent my code, my autoformatter does. It is way less effort to get the braces right and then have the indent level inferred automatically

Automated tools get in my way of thinking. I turn off intellisense, auto-formatters, etc...

I'll run auto tools during check-in, but not during coding sessions.

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