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The Lobster Programming Language

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Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#11

Post by pklausler »

scotty79 wrote: post #8
nobleach wrote: post #5

Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…

I'm automatically going to be interested in any language with significant white space because there are very few mainstream ones and I hate the visual clutter that block delimiters create. Pretty much there's just Python. Scala 3 can happily do both. I think we'd be better off if text editors just had option of representing braces and such as consistent indentation. Block delimiting tokens should optionally have sema…

You'd love Haskell, which uses curly braces for many constructs, but also has rules by which they are implied by indentation -- so in practice you only ever see them on records.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#12

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

nobleach wrote: post #5

Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…

Never understood how putting up roadblocks for developers trying to copy-paste code was deemed acceptable, or GVR (and others) thought the solution to poorly formatted code was making formatting carry semantics instead of just writing an auto formatter.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#13

Post by Night_Thastus »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #12
nobleach wrote: post #5

Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…

Never understood how putting up roadblocks for developers trying to copy-paste code was deemed acceptable, or GVR (and others) thought the solution to poorly formatted code was making formatting carry semantics instead of just writing an auto formatter.

I agree. Autoformatters are everywhere and easy to use. I'd far rather do that (plus maybe a pre-commit hook) than have to deal with whitespace in the language.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#14

Post by nialv7 »

nobleach wrote: post #5

Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…

Was coming here to comment the exactly same thing. Significant indentation makes me shudder.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#15

Post by scotty79 »

pklausler wrote: post #11
scotty79 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm automatically going to be interested in any language with significant white space because there are very few mainstream ones and I hate the visual clutter that block delimiters create. Pretty much there's just Python. Scala 3 can happily do both. I think we'd be better off if text editors just had option of representing braces and such as consistent indentation. Block delimiting tokens should optionally have sema…

You'd love Haskell, which uses curly braces for many constructs, but also has rules by which they are implied by indentation -- so in practice you only ever see them on records.

I'm not sure. The semantics is too wild to care about indentation or delimiters. I love Scala 3 though. Very rich and flexible language.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#16

Post by recursivecaveat »

pklausler wrote: post #11
scotty79 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm automatically going to be interested in any language with significant white space because there are very few mainstream ones and I hate the visual clutter that block delimiters create. Pretty much there's just Python. Scala 3 can happily do both. I think we'd be better off if text editors just had option of representing braces and such as consistent indentation. Block delimiting tokens should optionally have sema…

You'd love Haskell, which uses curly braces for many constructs, but also has rules by which they are implied by indentation -- so in practice you only ever see them on records.

I love python syntax overall, absolutely despise Haskell. Wastes my time constantly and gives me incomprehensible compiler errors when you screw it up. Expression oriented languages are really poorly suited for whitespace imo, unless they're hyper-regular like s-expressions: I could imagine a decent whitespace-based version of those.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#17

Post by dang »

Related. Others?

The Lobster Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44051841 - May 2025 (6 comments)

The Lobster Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31453822 - May 2022 (14 comments)

The Lobster Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25498005 - Dec 2020 (4 comments)

The Lobster Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567160 - April 2019 (164 comments)

The Lobster Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15557060 - Oct 2017 (2 comments)

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#18

Post by nobleach »

FredPret wrote: post #9
nobleach wrote: post #5

Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…

YAML has given me eye-twitching ever since I went on an ill-considered quest of setting up wifi on a Debian server years ago. I never figured it out by the way - just bought a really long LAN cable.

YAML with Go templating (like you'd find in Helm Charts) was enough to push me over the edge.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#19

Post by scotty79 »

nathan_compton wrote: post #7

One thing I hate about Generative AI is that it has flipped the value prop of making your language similar to an existing popular language. This helps new programmers but it really messes with generative AI. I can feel the era of fun new programming languages that might break big ending.

I'm afraid about that too, but I hope that AI will get significantly smarter faster than it takes for any new language take popularity among humans. That it will be smart enough to not be so language sensitive.

Who knows. Maybe some new fun language will pop up that's hard to write for humans, but easy to write for AI (because it can work in millisecond loop with language server, think borrow checker to the moon) and also exceedingly easy to read for humans. Because humans will, I think stil for a long time, need to debug ever shrinking corner cases where AI generated something subtly but spectacularly wrong.

Re: The Lobster Programming Language

#20

Post by adiabatty »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #12
nobleach wrote: post #5

Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…

Never understood how putting up roadblocks for developers trying to copy-paste code was deemed acceptable, or GVR (and others) thought the solution to poorly formatted code was making formatting carry semantics instead of just writing an auto formatter.

To be fair to GvR, autoformatters weren’t commonplace in the late 80s and early 90s. Were there even any?

Ever since Go got big, though, everyone else is discovering how fantastically nice they are, and that’s a good thing.

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