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Rhombus Language 1.0

blog.racket-lang.org

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Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#31

Post by lmm »

iLemming wrote: post #17
bjoli wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people hate sexprs. Even seemingly reasonable folks. I imagined they have met students that really struggle with the syntax, while grokking the concepts easily. I myself have heard "the parentheses are hard to balance" and "after a while you dont even see the parentheses" enough times that I think maybe both can be correct.

> A lot of people hate sexprs In all my time I have never come across a single Lisper, neither in person nor online, and I know far more than a few dozens, who once grokked the REPL-driven workflow and the structural editing idioms only to later, for whatever reason, suddenly start disliking or even hating s-expressions. All that so-called "hatred" stems from unfamiliarity. People fuss about Lisps lacking static type…

> In all my time I have never come across a single Lisper, neither in person nor online, and I know far more than a few dozens, who once grokked the REPL-driven workflow and the structural editing idioms only to later, for whatever reason, suddenly start disliking or even hating s-expressions.

And we've never seen bullet holes in these parts of the plane, so there's no point putting armour there.

Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#33

Post by adastra22 »

iLemming wrote: post #17
bjoli wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people hate sexprs. Even seemingly reasonable folks. I imagined they have met students that really struggle with the syntax, while grokking the concepts easily. I myself have heard "the parentheses are hard to balance" and "after a while you dont even see the parentheses" enough times that I think maybe both can be correct.

> A lot of people hate sexprs In all my time I have never come across a single Lisper, neither in person nor online, and I know far more than a few dozens, who once grokked the REPL-driven workflow and the structural editing idioms only to later, for whatever reason, suddenly start disliking or even hating s-expressions. All that so-called "hatred" stems from unfamiliarity. People fuss about Lisps lacking static type…

This is survivorship bias. People who don't like s-expr aren't lispers.

I've used Lisp before. I can read s-expr code. Unfamiliarity is not the issue. I just don't like them. I don't like Haskell/ML either, and I've written large projects in both, so it's not a Lisp-specific thing.

Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#34

Post by adastra22 »

miffi wrote: post #21
ginko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It‘s a source of problems with mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members for fairly little upside. Imo it also makes moving blocks of code more cumbersome.

Shrubbery, Rhombus's first-pass indentation-sensitive syntax, has a syntax form to facilitate copy-paste. With guillemets, « and », you can make a section of Shrubbery code indentation-insensitive. The idea for copy-paste it to "armor" the section you want to copy with guillemets in the right places, and unarmoring it after posting. This needs editor support to do fluidly, but imo it's much better than trying to copy…

That's horrifying.

Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#35

Post by shevy-java »

"Modern programming languages reflect a consensus on the the most important programming concepts, including lexically scoped variables, closures, objects, pattern matching, and type parametricity. Why, then, yet another programming language?"

I don't want to be too nitpicky but ... the sentence has two "the", aka "the the most important". It is a really irrelevant error, but on the other hand, has nobody ever read the documentation through slowly, before publishing? Because then this means lack of care and interest. Again, people make typos, that's ok, but if you try to promote a new language, you should at the least have read your own (!!!) writing once. And I am quite certain that the author has not bothered to check his own primary writing here, not even once. So why would he then expect others to want to use a new programming language? Sure, that typo means nothing at all about the programming language itself, but as I got older I also realised that many great language designers are horrible at writing documentation. I'd much rather use languages that are very well documented. Naturally this is a tiny issue here, but if you don't even care about typos in the primary introduction, it makes one wonder about the long term focus of the language as such.

Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#36

Post by shevy-java »

ashton314 wrote: post #24
psychoslave wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What with the term itself, is that some monthy python reference or related to tree algebraic structure?

Matthew Flatt picked “shrubbery” because it’s tree-like but not fully expanded, so it tends to be more broad/flat than deep like a tree. Hence also the term “enforrestation” when you fully expanded it. I think the Monty Python reference is just a happy coincidence.

The knights who say Ni demand a shrubbery.

Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#38

Post by avarun »

shevy-java wrote: post #35

"Modern programming languages reflect a consensus on the the most important programming concepts, including lexically scoped variables, closures, objects, pattern matching, and type parametricity. Why, then, yet another programming language?" I don't want to be too nitpicky but ... the sentence has two "the", aka "the the most important". It is a really irrelevant error, but on the other hand, has nobody ever read th…

Extremely poor reasoning to assume that an author, upon reading his own primary writing once, is guaranteed to catch a typo of this nature.

Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#39

Post by drob518 »

psychoslave wrote: post #22
drob518 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My editor balances my parentheses (Emacs Paredit). I rarely think about them. I just think structurally and the editor manages the details.

It really feels like, "when I move through the wasteland, I only focus on the path and GPS is guiding me well". For some reasons, people tend to prefer having a walk in a forest rather than in z wasteland.

Look, if you’re committed to Blub, don’t let me talk you out of it.

Re: Rhombus Language 1.0

#40

Post by rmunn »

ginko wrote: post #8
pasquinelli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you think it was a bad choice?

It‘s a source of problems with mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members for fairly little upside. Imo it also makes moving blocks of code more cumbersome.

Any language with significant indentation ends up specifying "Indent with spaces, not tab characters" for just that reason. As I recall, Python had that as a recommendation while F# ended up with it as a requirement, but it's been a while since I looked at that so I could be wrong. But in my experience, the category "people who complain about significant whitespace" is nearly a subset of the category "people who prefer tabs over spaces for indentation".

(Moving blocks of code around is not a real problem if your editor is capable of easily highlighting the thing that was just pasted. Because then you just hit that key binding, then press `>` or `<` — or Tab/Shift+Tab if you are using an inferior editor ;-) — until the indentation is where you need it. I haven't found it to be a big problem in practice when writing Python, though mileage will likely vary).

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