Unusual Raku Features

Post by j16sdiz » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 4:21 AM UTC

perihelions wrote: post #40

tail_exchange wrote: post #20

# Does weird things with nested lists too > [1, [2, 3], 4, 5] > [10, 20] [11 [22 23] 14 25] This article makes me feel like I'm watching a Nao Geo/Animal Planet documentary. Beautiful and interesting to see these creatures in the wild? Absolutely. Do I want to keep my distance? As far away as possible.

I agree. This attempt to fuse higher-order functional programming with magic special behaviors from Perl comes off to me as quixotic. HOP works because you're gluing together extremely simple primitives—ordinary pure functions. You can build big things fearlessly because you perfectly understand the simple bricks they're made of. But here: magic functions—which behave differently on lists-of-scalars vs. lists-of-list…

Post by db48x » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 4:30 AM UTC

justinator wrote: post #43

agumonkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very cohesive, [7] > (1,3,9...*)[4,5] (81 243) [8] > (1,3,9...*)[(1..3)] (3 9 27) and nestable [0] > (1,2,4...*)[(1,2,4...*)[1,2,3]]

These are all very clever, but what's the use case? I'm not saying there isn't one, I just don't know what it is! Not to speak of the dead, but Perl was utilitarian: it was built to solve problems. From my point of view, these are solutions to problems I've never had.

    #| Dörrie's bounds
    assess -> \x=(1,10,100...10⁶) {
        ½ × sum (1 + x⁻¹)**(x),
                (1 + x⁻¹)**(x+1)
    }

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 4:49 AM UTC

j16sdiz wrote: post #52

perihelions wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. This attempt to fuse higher-order functional programming with magic special behaviors from Perl comes off to me as quixotic. HOP works because you're gluing together extremely simple primitives—ordinary pure functions. You can build big things fearlessly because you perfectly understand the simple bricks they're made of. But here: magic functions—which behave differently on lists-of-scalars vs. lists-of-list…

Doing High-Order Programming in perl is not something new. There is a full book about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-Order_Perl Whats nee in Raku is putting them together with other experimental features as first class citizens

Post by derefr » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 5:12 AM UTC

ekidd wrote: post #36

klibertp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a mistake if you're thinking like that. Applying an operation that generally works on single values over a list of values automatically is an incredibly powerful technique. If you have ever used Numpy, you will appreciate not needing it in many cases where Raku's built-ins suffice.

My fundamental objection here it that it is recursive. The non-recursive hyperoperators all have nice clean mathematical definitions. The recursive ones are just weird and ad hoc, at least from the perpective of the underlying mathematical structures.

Post by kjellsbells » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 5:35 AM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #46

rjh29 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as Perl, nobody wants to maintain it, but it's extremely fun to write. It has a lot of expression. You can see that in Raku's ability to define keyword arguments with a shorthand (e.g. :global(:$g)' as well as assuming a value of 'True', so you can just call match(/foo/, :g) to get a global regex match). Perl has tons of this stuff too, all aimed at making the language quicker and more fun to write, but less rea…

its not that reading perl is hard, the _intent_ of the operations of often hard/unclear. Yes its nice to write dense fancy code, however, something very boring to write like PHP is a lot of "loop over this bucket and do something with the fish in the bucket, afterwards, take the bucket and throw it into the bucket pile" that mirrors a 'human follows these steps' type.