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Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

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Re: Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

#11

Post by zelphirkalt »

kordlessagain wrote: post #6

While the author claims "semantics beat syntax every day of the week," the entire article focuses on syntax preferences rather than semantic differences. Pipelining can become hard to debug when chains get very long. The author doesn't address how hard it can be to identify which step in a long chain caused an error. They do make fun of Python, however. But don't say much about why they don't like it other than showi…

You can add peek steps in pipelines and inspect the in between results. Not really any different from normal function call debugging imo.

Re: Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

#12

Post by Mond_ »

kordlessagain wrote: post #6

While the author claims "semantics beat syntax every day of the week," the entire article focuses on syntax preferences rather than semantic differences. Pipelining can become hard to debug when chains get very long. The author doesn't address how hard it can be to identify which step in a long chain caused an error. They do make fun of Python, however. But don't say much about why they don't like it other than showi…

> Pipelining can become hard to debug when chains get very long. The author doesn't address how hard it can be to identify which step in a long chain caused an error.

Yeah, I agree that this can be problem when you lean heavily into monadic handling (i.e. you have fallible operations and then pipe the error or null all the way through, losing the information of where it came from).

But that doesn't have much to do with the article: You have the same problem with non-pipelined functional code. (And in either case, I think that it's not that big of a problem in practice.)

> The author uses examples that function very differently.

Yeah, this is addressed in one of the later sections. Imo, having a unified word for such a convenience feature (no matter how it's implemented) is better than thinking of these features as completely separate.

Re: Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

#14

Post by fsckboy »

kordlessagain wrote: post #6

While the author claims "semantics beat syntax every day of the week," the entire article focuses on syntax preferences rather than semantic differences. Pipelining can become hard to debug when chains get very long. The author doesn't address how hard it can be to identify which step in a long chain caused an error. They do make fun of Python, however. But don't say much about why they don't like it other than showi…

the paragraph you quoted (atm, 7 mins ago, did it change?) says:

>Let me make it very clear: This is [not an] article it's a hot take about syntax. In practice, semantics beat syntax every day of the week. In other words, don’t take it too seriously.

Re: Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

#16

Post by rad_gruchalski »

jaymbo wrote: post #3

This is why I love Scala so much

Scala is by far one of the nicest programming languages I have ever worked with. Scala with no JVM dependency would a killer programming language BUT only when all async features work out of the box like they do JVM. It’s been attempted a couple of times and it never succeeded.

Re: Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

#18

Post by zelphirkalt »

To one up this: Of course it is even better, if your language allows you to implement proper pipelining with implicit argument passing by yourself. Then the standard language does not need to provide it and assign meaning to some symbols for pipelining. You can decide for yourself what symbols are used and what you find intuitive.

Pipelining can guide one to write a bit cleaner code, viewing steps of computation as such, and not as modifications of global state. It forces one to make each step return a result, write proper functions. I like proper pipelining a lot.

Re: Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

#19

Post by mrkeen » 

  data.iter()
      .filter(|w| w.alive)
      .map(|w| w.id)
      .collect()

  collect(map(filter(iter(data), |w| w.alive), |w| w.id))
The second approach is open for extension - it allows you to write new functions on old datatypes.

> Quick challenge for the curious Rustacean, can you explain why we cannot rewrite the above code like this, even if we import all of the symbols?

Probably for lack of

> weird operators like , , $, or >>=

Re: Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

#20

Post by Mond_ »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #18

To one up this: Of course it is even better, if your language allows you to implement proper pipelining with implicit argument passing by yourself. Then the standard language does not need to provide it and assign meaning to some symbols for pipelining. You can decide for yourself what symbols are used and what you find intuitive. Pipelining can guide one to write a bit cleaner code, viewing steps of computation as s…

> if your language allows you to implement proper pipelining with implicit argument passing by yourself > You can decide for yourself what symbols are used and what you find intuitive

i mean this sounds fun

but tbh it also sounds like it'd result in my colleague Carl defining an utterly bespoke DSL in the language, and using it to write the worst spaghetti code the world has ever seen, leaving the code base an unreadable mess full of sharp edges and implicit behavior

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