The Earl Grey programming language • Hacker News Board

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#41

Post by agumonkey » Fri, May 08, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC

shakethemonkey wrote: post #20

Shoop wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of lisps use hyphens in variable names

There's plenty of precedent. It's just rare for a reason. I'm not sure allowing slightly easier access to CSS syntax justifies it.

I'd love to hear why people prefer underscores over hyphens. I think I grew out of syntax fanboy-ism, but C and python __private__, _special_variable are everything but readable to me. They break the visual line too much. Even historically it was a weird symbol, originally a line break that made it into non-space separator in PL/1, then almost everywhere. Before that it was pure formatting, a typewriter glyph to be overtyped/composed on words to underline them.

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#42

Post by agumonkey » Fri, May 08, 2015, 1:58 AM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #16

shakethemonkey wrote: post #14

Hyphens in variable names. It's a bold strategy for a scripting language, Cotton.

Imagine being able to type style.border-width in JS instead of style.borderWidth

You just reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#43

Post by bratsche » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:05 AM UTC

trafnar wrote: post #7

"Oh god, do we need another language that compiles to javascript?!" —Everyone, probably

That was my first reaction until I scrolled down the page a little. This language looks really nice.

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#44

Post by makmanalp » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

I really like how the tooling to create a full application is already there, it isn't like "here's my new language, but there are no libraries, good luck!".

> Global variables need to be declared to be accessible: > globals: > document, google, React

If I'm getting this correctly, what a brilliant idea! Contain the shittiness by having one single location where all globals are declared. So very helpful.

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#45

Post by msl09 » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

gklitt wrote: post #38

trafnar wrote: post #7

"Oh god, do we need another language that compiles to javascript?!" —Everyone, probably

I think it's unfortunate that this is currently the top comment on this post. Someone puts hundreds of commits of work into a nifty language with a nice feature set (including compile-to-js) and awesome integrations, and this is what they get on HN... I think this looks like a great project, we can never have too many programming languages to play around with.

>we can never have too many programming languages to play around with.

Wait until we start having legacy code in all those languages.

>we use 30 different compile-to-js languages used in our projects(that are no longer being developed) and you have to maintain it.

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#46

Post by sp332 » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #41

shakethemonkey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of precedent. It's just rare for a reason. I'm not sure allowing slightly easier access to CSS syntax justifies it.

I'd love to hear why people prefer underscores over hyphens. I think I grew out of syntax fanboy-ism, but C and python __private__, _special_variable are everything but readable to me. They break the visual line too much. Even historically it was a weird symbol, originally a line break that made it into non-space separator in PL/1, then almost everywhere. Before that it was pure formatting, a typewriter glyph to be o…

Because fanboy-ism could be parsed as fanboy - ism = fanboy minus ism.

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#47

Post by baldfat » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:08 AM UTC

Am I the only one childish enough to ask for the language to be called Earl Grey Hot in honor of Star Trek?

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#48

Post by gresrun » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #47

Am I the only one childish enough to ask for the language to be called Earl Grey Hot in honor of Star Trek?

The JS transpiler should be named 'picard'

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#49

Post by pooriaazimi » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:13 AM UTC

mikejholly wrote: post #10

Await, pattern matching and macros are great language features Node and CoffeeScript both lack. Nice work!

IcedCoffeeScript had await/defer three of four years ago: https://github.com/maxtaco/coffee-script/

But I agree, excellent set of features.

Re: The Earl Grey programming language

#50

Post by agumonkey » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:16 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #46

agumonkey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear why people prefer underscores over hyphens. I think I grew out of syntax fanboy-ism, but C and python __private__, _special_variable are everything but readable to me. They break the visual line too much. Even historically it was a weird symbol, originally a line break that made it into non-space separator in PL/1, then almost everywhere. Before that it was pure formatting, a typewriter glyph to be o…

Because fanboy-ism could be parsed as fanboy - ism = fanboy minus ism.

You mean like this :

let some-var = a-number-another-number

instead of

let some-var = a-number - another-number