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I don't understand why Ruby's syntax is seen as so elegant. It's ambiguous and a nightmare to parse. http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42432568185/how-to-par...
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And to be honest, (T | Nil) is pretty difficult to distinguish from (Maybe a = a + 1). Complaints feel difficult to motivate to me anyway.
They both accomplish the same thing: no unexpected null. The exact mechanism was never the interesting part. Maybe being monadic does offer some other benefits but the killer advantage is the responsible handling of nil. Crystal doesn't seem to have a foundation in monadic programming so the type unions seem like a reasonable approach there.
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An ambiguous syntax is not elegant to program with. Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno!
> Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno! Neither. It's a message sent to an object. The object decides how to respond to that message. Caring about the implementation of the message receiver breaks information hiding. If you have to distinguish between .message and .message(), you already know more than you need to know to interact with that object. Every language is confusing until you understan…
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Elegant to program with. Not write a parser for.
An ambiguous syntax is not elegant to program with. Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno!
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> Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno! Neither. It's a message sent to an object. The object decides how to respond to that message. Caring about the implementation of the message receiver breaks information hiding. If you have to distinguish between .message and .message(), you already know more than you need to know to interact with that object. Every language is confusing until you understan…
Actually, you're wrong. The syntactic ambiguity between local variable references and implicit self method calls us not accurately resolved by thinking of it as message sends because it's only a message sends if it is a self method call, not it is a local variable reference. This is a real syntactic ambiguity in Ruby.
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I don't see a reasons for null to exist in a new language in 2015.
How do you model a "zero or one" relationship without null? Maybe your answer is "with Optional" (or Option, or Maybe). We just choose to use union types and have "Nil | T" (Nil or T) be the same as "Option(T)" in other languages.
I'm looking for something beautiful like Ruby but fast like Go. Do you think Crystal fits this bill? Also, are there packages/libs/gems for Crystal? What are they called? What do I google for? One of the major reasons why I dumped Go is that it's just too verbose and makes me write too much boilerplate code. I want to sort a collection and I have to write the same algorithm every single time for every single type. It…
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> Is this a variable reference? Is it a method call? I dunno! Neither. It's a message sent to an object. The object decides how to respond to that message. Caring about the implementation of the message receiver breaks information hiding. If you have to distinguish between .message and .message(), you already know more than you need to know to interact with that object. Every language is confusing until you understan…
I've been programming in Ruby for years, and the inherent ambiguity proven by the complexity of the parser isn't made better by telling me I'm not thinking right. Variables and methods are treated differently. I can't pass arguments to a variable, I can't even write foo(), but if it were a method I could. I can't treat variables like any other object because they have different rules applied.
I'm confused -- if you're knowingly invoking a method, why are you unsure whether it's a method or a variable?
I programmed for years in Ruby too. I just accepted a whole bunch of stuff as mysterious and shrugged. It didn't mean the language was ambiguous, I just didn't have any idea of what the actual model was.
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We like the way Ruby lets you quickly prototype things, but its performance isn't very good (it's just good) and it also lacks static type checks (for example "undefined method '...' for Nil" is a very common runtime error). So, we are trying to create a language with all the nice aspects of Ruby but with static checks and better performance. Of course that comes at a price: no dynamic aspects (no eval, no instance_e…
People talk about how Crystal's performance is better because it's statically compiled and removes Ruby's dynamic features, but I'm not sure static compilation is the best way to achieve performance, and I don't think the dynamic features need to damage performance. For example, JRuby+Truffle runs Crystal's own sample programs around twice as fast as Crystal does, without static compilation, and while still supportin…
I don't understand why Ruby's syntax is seen as so elegant. It's ambiguous and a nightmare to parse. http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42432568185/how-to-par...
Let's take rust as a counter example. IMHO this is ugly:
fn foo() {...}
fn foo {...}