161–170 of 257 posts
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That’s exactly what you want in a language. It should always feel like cheating! Also debuggers. Give RR a try some time :)
Every time I try it, it doesn't seem to work right. Because I don't feel like debugging my debugger, I just go back to gdb. Yet I only hear other people speaking of it positively, so it seems they don't have that experience.
"If you define a MAIN function, any parameters you give it will be automatically turned into CLI flags." This is actually cool
What other languages do this? I love it
Python has typer[1] to do this with type hints. It's limited and gets ugly quickly, but I love it for simple scripts.
[0] nushell.sh
[1] typer.tiangolo.com
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Hoon is occupying that top-left quandrant as well, as long as you you don't mistake your surprise for horror - https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school . Surprisingly powerful.
Hoon is in the top right quadrant when you begin to understand the performance characteristics and what it would take to improve them. And the type system is pitiful.
But this idea of programming in The Large vs The Small: I disagree with that comparison. A less wise person might assume that means it makes a bad language for The Large work. On the contrary, it's probably just as good as any other language at it, maybe better. The problem, as it was with other gremliny languages, is you need wisdom to use it.
Simplest example: using $x instead of @x. Any person who has used a similar language "enough" would never confuse these. In fact, the sigils actually make your life easier when reading the code, because you now know the type (well, the simple type, or with Raku, the interface) just by looking at that variable anywhere it's used. Now you don't have to go look it up, and you can do useful things with the same variable namespace using different sigils. It looks weird, and it's extra characters you shouldn't need, and you need to know what it means to use it, but it can make life easier. (https://www.perl.com/article/on-sigils/)
The problem comes for people without wisdom. The people who don't really know what they're doing. They will probably find this gremlin language a living nightmare. These people need a lot of bowling-bumpers and floaties and kevlar gloves and hard hats and GPS. Somebody let them into a store full of sharp objects and they need a lot of padding to navigate it without killing themselves.
That doesn't mean you can't build a skyscraper with the gremlin language. It just means the accident-prone unwise non-gremlins can't build a skyscraper with it. But wise gremlins can.
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It's actually an awful misfeature, because those Rats will automatically turn into floats when the rational representation gets too big: > WHAT 1/10 (Rat) > WHAT 1/100000000000000000000 (Num) (There is FatRat, which does not so 'promote', but it is not the default.)
I disagree that graceful degradation from Rat to Num (ie double) when Real numbers over- or under-flow is a misfeature. We could (and have) debate whether FatRat should be the default, but imo the right expectation for an untyped language should be that very large or small numbers are represented with a floating point representation that (i) uses the FPU that's right there and (ii) sacrifices precision in the mantiss…
I am definitely a gremlin, in a specific sense: I love tools that are quirky and complicated in a way that makes me more productive. But this idea of programming in The Large vs The Small: I disagree with that comparison. A less wise person might assume that means it makes a bad language for The Large work. On the contrary, it's probably just as good as any other language at it, maybe better. The problem, as it was w…
Tooling exist to help you and your team do the required work as good or fast as possible.
If you are using tools to gate keep juniors in your field, or that are unnecessary complex in order to stroke your own ego. Then the tool is more of a weapon against the rest of your organisation instead of something helpful.
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Let me guess, you were never a Perl programmer? Trust me, if you have a Perl background, a lot of that syntax looks pretty familiar (the @ sigil in particular denotes an array).
Yes. Though that's my point, to me it doesn't feel the most welcoming to others who know another language (or languages). By all means though, if folks like it, carry on. I am sure Raku as a runtime is well engineered, I respect that. I don't know what lineage Raku shares other than Perl, but it seems to be on its own plane if you will, and thats cool.
Having come from a Pascal background, C felt weird with all of its curly braces. Then after getting familiarity with C and its ilk, Python felt weird. In fact one of the reasons I was reluctant to learn Python was because I was good enough at Perl that I didn’t see the need to learn Python. I had a similar repulsion to LISP too, until I learned s-expressions and now I can see beauty in LISPs too.
Bar for esoteric languages, whose goals are typically different from a general purpose language, most languages are designed to be useful. So once you spend a little time in it you do start to appreciate some of syntactical quirks you once perceived as ugliness
…or at least that’s been my experience with most languages (and I’ve learned a lot of programming languages over the years)
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Python top right, Go bottom right, Brainfuck bottom left, Rust or Perl top left. (Don't kill me fanatics)
Do you think many people would put Rust and Perl next to each other?
Rust feels like an industrial version of Perl to me.