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Raku: A language for gremlins

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Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#171

Post by CodesInChaos »

trealira wrote: post #82
munificent wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't actively push you there, which is why it's on the bottom half. There is a fairly coherent mental model for C and once you have it, the language rarely surprises you. But when it does surprise you, it's almost never anything good. Stuff like Duff's device, `3[someArray] = value`, etc. The surprises are always the language's raw machinery showing through in unpleasant ways, and never a delightful bonus featu…

> The surprises are always the language's raw machinery showing through in unpleasant ways, and never a delightful bonus feature the designers added for you. I was reading "Writing Solid Code" by Steve Maguire (though it should really be called "how to write code in C without shooting yourself in the foot"). One thing that surprised me, but which made sense, was that pointers can overflow. It's unlikely, and ANSI non…

I'm not a C language lawyer, but I'd expect C to have a rule that calculating the one-past pointer will not overflow within an array object. So malloc would not be allowed to return such an allocation and this would be a bug in the caller, not in this function.

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#172

Post by vanderZwan »

SyrupThinker wrote: post #128
flir wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arithmetic or geometric See, that doesn't delight me. OEIS is what's needed here.

Well… that was supposedly considered at some point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BJIfPFpaMRI&t=1891 (~1m)

Heh, even Larry Wall says "no, that way lies madness"

(now I want to see it in an esolang precisely because he said that)

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#173

Post by mochaki »

munificent wrote: post #2

One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes: 1. How much should the language surprise you? 2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you? surprising ^ | | | delight horrify | | | v unsurprising Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly ass…

[dead]

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#174

Post by mst »

flir wrote: post #86
Dylan16807 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want it to take the first match? Inputting a unique prefix doesn't sound practical.

I thought about that. I thought the compiler could error with "Insufficient data for meaningful answer" until you'd added enough digits that the sequence was unambiguous. Then I tried it in OEIS and as you say there are too many sequences that start [1,2,3,4,5,...] - I think we may be stuck with generators and yield. But they're not exactly delightful.

Convert https://trout.me.uk/data.jpg to sixels and have the compiler emit that?

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#175

Post by mst »

vanderZwan wrote: post #172
SyrupThinker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well… that was supposedly considered at some point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BJIfPFpaMRI&t=1891 (~1m)

Heh, even Larry Wall says "no, that way lies madness" (now I want to see it in an esolang precisely because he said that)

This is much like my wanting to eventually resurrect my MicroVAX 2100 ... so I can install Eunice on it ... so I can get perl's Configure script to take the other branch of the test that reports "Congratulations, you aren't running Eunice" for real and take a photograph of it.

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#176

Post by DontchaKnowit »

munificent wrote: post #2

One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes: 1. How much should the language surprise you? 2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you? surprising ^ | | | delight horrify | | | v unsurprising Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly ass…

Pedantry incoming-

one of my greatest pet peeves is when some words in a list, or diagram, are in their adjectival form and some are in their verbal form. "Surprising" + "horrify"

It really unnerves me. The worst is that nearly every company has this in some form in their promotional or educational materials.

E.g. here at Genericorp, we prioritize the following valurs : integrity, kindness, honest,

Etc

You get my point. Drives me nuts this kind of thing constantly slips through the cracks.

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#177

Post by 0x445442 »

Speaking in general terms here to avoid NAXALT responses but it’s been my experience that the Raku/Perl crowd enjoy being clever for clever’s sake and are more concerned about the language itself than the problems being solved. I can see advantages of this cleverness for small scripts but extending a language who’s roots are in a Bash replacement to large scale project development seems DOA to me.

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#178

Post by mst »

jsf01 wrote: post #163

This is a fascinating language! I am so curious: how does the “anything goes” matcher work? I struggle to imagine how one would implement that ~~ operator.

    $lhs ~~ $rhs
is mostly sugar for

    $rhs.ACCEPTS($lhs)
and then method resolution (including multimethod handling, of course) figures out which ACCEPTS method to call and that does ... whatever the author of the type implemented.

('mostly' because ~~ actually aliases $lhs as $_ and passes $_ as the argument to ACCEPTS)

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#179

Post by giancarlostoro »

munificent wrote: post #2

One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes: 1. How much should the language surprise you? 2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you? surprising ^ | | | delight horrify | | | v unsurprising Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly ass…

Is this measurement on the entire language or specific features? Because if its on the entire thing, I can see the results not being good (all over the different quadrants).

I do agree though, that if a language surprises me, it should be to the left quadrant in this case. If a language is not surprising me, it should be delight as well.

I don't know if I call people who made / use Brainfuck sadists as much as I'd call them very geeky / nerdy.

Re: Raku: A language for gremlins

#180

Post by Joker_vD »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #176
munificent wrote: post #2

One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes: 1. How much should the language surprise you? 2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you? surprising ^ | | | delight horrify | | | v unsurprising Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly ass…

Pedantry incoming- one of my greatest pet peeves is when some words in a list, or diagram, are in their adjectival form and some are in their verbal form. "Surprising" + "horrify" It really unnerves me. The worst is that nearly every company has this in some form in their promotional or educational materials. E.g. here at Genericorp, we prioritize the following valurs : integrity, kindness, honest, Etc You get my poi…

Well, the axiis are orthogonal. One of them is for the thing's quality, another is for the thing's action, so you get adjectives along one axis, and verbs along the other.
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