141–150 of 239 posts
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Go and “simple tooling” don’t really belong in the same sentence. Powerful tooling, sure, but simple?
Would be helpful if you elaborate which part is not simple. Coming from C++ and JavaScript, there aren't many languages that can claim to have "simpler" tooling than Go.
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I wouldn't change that in any way. I'd might make it an Arguments class, but I wound't make what parser returns merely a dict.
Yeah, so what happens when you have an option with a '-' in it that isn't valid as a variable name (I know what happens). It's just stupid.
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That is because Clojure is done, there is hardly anything being done other than probably what matters to NuBank and Datomic mostly. Also its market share adoption kind of shows it.
That's a pretty far cry from "complexity is unavoidable". Reading that to me implies that the complexity is inherent in programming language design, whereas this follow-up argument seems to say that complexity is the result of tacking on new features. The latter is a bit tautological, since the size of the language grammar is itself a measure of complexity.
The complexity would be to grow like Common Lisp, instead it is up to Clojure folks to write Java, C#, JavaScript code, therein lies the complexity.
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That is because Clojure is done, there is hardly anything being done other than probably what matters to NuBank and Datomic mostly. Also its market share adoption kind of shows it.
> That is because Clojure is done Yes, that's one approach to avoiding ever growing complexity, maybe the other languages should try it sometime ;) With that said, everything around Clojure keeps improving and getting better. While the language doesn't have static types, clojure.spec offers something that is even better than static typing (imo), and doesn't even require any changes to the core language. Something els…
In theory we only need parentheses, prefix operators and a REPL, but mainstream never went down that route.
Anyway the complexity then ends up being custom DSLs and macros.
good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though. around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python. it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift. the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM. I think the letdo…
Swift just wasn't doing the same things. And even if it did, Swift would compete with other languages that were understood as "a better Python", like Julia. Even then, Swift only came to Linux in 2016, Windows in 2020, and FreeBSD less than a year ago with WWDC 2025.
I think it doesn't help that the mid 2010s saw a burst of Cool and New languages announced or go mainstream. Go, Julia, Rust, TypeScript, Solidity, etc. along with Swift. I think most of us only have space to pick up one or two of these cool-and-new languages every few years.
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Maybe Chris Lattner leaving and creating Mojo also didn’t help in that regard. Swift for TensorFlow was a cool idea in that time …
Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it": https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400 --- start quote --- Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, speci…
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Python 3 barely managed to dethrone Python.
I'm sorry, that's absolutely bullshit. In fact, I wish we had left everyone who complained behind—the python community would have been happier and healthier for it. Absolute crybabies who wanted to be catered to without caring for how intractable the problems with python2 were—e.g. dealing with unicode was a royal pain in the ass, and the bytes/string divide completely fixed it. IMO, it was the best-executed breaking…
Anyone else think the weather in the screen shot at the top of the page is a bit off? Snow in Lisbon (apparently it snowed there once in 2006), rain in Reykjavik at -1°. AI slop?
good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though. around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python. it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift. the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM. I think the letdo…
That's my read too. Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++. ...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a smal…