There is nothing I miss more in TS than pattern matching, so I came in with a lot of good will, but the syntax for it looks jarring to me. Might be a matter of taste, I'm not made for meaningful whitespaces
Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
111–120 of 237 posts
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#112[deleted]
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#113There is nothing I miss more in TS than pattern matching, so I came in with a lot of good will, but the syntax for it looks jarring to me. Might be a matter of taste, I'm not made for meaningful whitespaces
You can use braces if you like
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#114Not CoffeeScript again
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#115If you find this interesting, you might also wanna suss out https://rescript-lang.org/ It is a shame that Bloomberg and Facebook made the whole situation pretty confusing though, but still, it is a nice idea.
I agree, Rescript is an actual language rather than syntactic sugar.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#116The JS community needs a Martin Odersky who will one day drops a JS 3 with indent-significant syntax upon them. F# had the same transition too.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wrote a bunch of CoffeeScript back in the day, and everyone I've spoken to about it feels the same, that it was a bad idea in hindsight I don't think it was a bad idea in hindsight. JS of the era was a pain to use; CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier, which is the reason it took off. Since then things changed and many "CoffeeScript features" are now "JavaScript features". Only with knowledge…
> CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier My point is that it kinda didn't. It looked prettier on the surface, but didn't actually solve any of the deeper problems of writing JavaScript. To write CoffeeScript you had to still know JavaScript and all its oddities. TypeScript solved those problems, and that's why it has taken off and had a meteoric rise to the point that it's practically synonymous wit…
TypeScript even took off after the earth had been salted by CoffeeScript. Many people were sceptical about TypeScript because they assumed it was as big of a buy-in as CoffeeScript - rather than it just being JS with some (mostly) strictly-additive syntax, that you would have been able to strip out without risk had TS never taken off.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#118Its not about how concise or short your code looks, its how about much time the new intern coming tomorrow needs to understand those 1000 line files. I find the syntax very hard to remember and confusing
And in times of Copilot & others writing become less and less a problem, as code completion works very well. Like this example: https://civet.dev/#everything-is-an-expression `items = for item of items`, in js you type `for`and copilot wrote nearly the full correct for-code. So you have to type not much and can read it easy.
To reiterate the point above: writing is not the biggest problem. reading is.
(Terse Perl may be delightful to write, as long as you still remember exactly what you wrote and why. But not after that.)
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#119Civet. Kopi luwak coffee. It's CoffeeScript. I wrote a bunch of CoffeeScript back in the day, and everyone I've spoken to about it feels the same, that it was a bad idea in hindsight, and a language dead end. The language was only syntactic sugar, and by not bringing anything else to the table, was unconvincing for ports and support in other ecosystems. It now seems that most codebases have been decaffeinated though.…
> I wrote a bunch of CoffeeScript back in the day, and everyone I've spoken to about it feels the same, that it was a bad idea in hindsight I don't think it was a bad idea in hindsight. JS of the era was a pain to use; CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier, which is the reason it took off. Since then things changed and many "CoffeeScript features" are now "JavaScript features". Only with knowledge…
> JS of the era was a pain to use; CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier
It didn't. Anything you learn / are familiar with will be easier to write - Coffescript was easier to write for people who learned Coffescript. Which in hindsight wasn't time well spent as they would've eventually had to bite the bullet anyway & just learn JavaScript like everyone else.
JavaScript is much much easier to write and read for a person who has chosen to learn JavaScript & has not had the occasion to learn Coffescript (i.e. most people) so you were also doing others a disservice if readability was one of your goals.
> which is the reason it took off
The reason it took off was the Ruby was going through a popularity trend & Rails devs wanted to work in a front-end language that felt syntactically familiar. It was purely aesthetic.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#120Civet. Kopi luwak coffee. It's CoffeeScript. I wrote a bunch of CoffeeScript back in the day, and everyone I've spoken to about it feels the same, that it was a bad idea in hindsight, and a language dead end. The language was only syntactic sugar, and by not bringing anything else to the table, was unconvincing for ports and support in other ecosystems. It now seems that most codebases have been decaffeinated though.…
> What's the benefit over Typescript? A few less characters? Faster TC39 proposal integrations?
Getting hands on experience with those proposals could be an argument, learning how they feel, learning how their availability changes the way people write code. Could this be called a research language? Sure, but that categorization would certainly influence the outcome of the observation.
I'm not disagreeing with any of your points though. Perhaps some mitigation could be provided by making their equivalent of decaffeinization a true first class citizen, intended to be run whenever a proposal gets rejected (or implicitly rejected by the language taking a different direction). This would have to be fine grained, and the language/tool would have to make "rolling preview of whatever proposals are currently in consideration" the code of its identity, not any particular set of language features.