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Dada, an experimental new programming language

dada-lang.org

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Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#161

Post by myrmidon »

couchand wrote: post #116
lkirkwood wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say that? I almost always use println! over write!. From the docs: "Use println! only for the primary output of your program. Use eprintln! instead to print error and progress messages."

What makes me say that a well-built program properly handles errors?

Panic is a perfectly proper way for a well-built program to stop execution.

There is no point in juggling around Result types if a failure means that you can not recover/continue execution. That is in fact exactly what panic! is intended for [1].

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch09-03-to-panic-or-not-to-pa...

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#162

Post by OtomotO »

sorenjan wrote: post #138

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do. > Updated to use modern pronouns. https://dada-lang.org/docs/about/

Non-native-speaker take: I don't care, it just reads a bit "weird" as I learned English before and "theirs" was plural... but I am adaptable.

As long as the meaning of the quote isn't changed I couldn't care less and it seems very important to some people.

What I personally dislike though is the whole "Ask me my pronouns" thing... like "No, I don't care about your gender or sex, as long as I am not interested in a romantic relationship with you - just tell me how to call you and I'll do it, but more effort? No!"

To elaborate a bit more: I find the topic exhausting not because I hate freedom of choosing your own gender or anything like that, but because I personally do not care about your gender at all.

I don't care about your religion, your skin color, your culture, your sex, your gender... I care about individual people but I don't reduce them to a certain aspect of their existence.

Now I find the whole "Ask me my pronouns" exhausting and also rude because it puts pressure on me to ask you about a topic I am not interested in. Like: I get it, there is social pressure, I understand that you're not happy with certain social "norms" and developments. I totally get that and I guess we are on the same side for many of them, but I still do not care about your gender until I care about your gender. (And also, I don't live in your country probably, so your local politics may be of interest, but I still don't like being forced to talk about them before I can ask a genuine question on e.g. a technology topic ;))

Just write his/her/theirs... and I will respect your choice. I will not think less of you, nor will I put you on a pedestal for something I do not care about.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#163

Post by Hamuko »

umvi wrote: post #158
sorenjan wrote: post #138

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do. > Updated to use modern pronouns. https://dada-lang.org/docs/about/

Is it still a quote in that case?

I've understood that you can modify quotes but you have to indicate the bits that you've modified. So "It enforces memory safety" becomes "[Rust] enforces memory safety" if you want to modify a quote to make more sense out of context.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#164

Post by BWStearns »

dartos wrote: post #32
happens wrote: post #25

It's weird, I want pretty much the exact opposite of this: a language with the expressive type system and syntax of rust, but with a garbage collector and a runtime at the cost performance. Basically go, but with rusts type system. I'm aware that there are a few languages that come close to this (crystal iirc), but in the end it's adoption and the ecosystem that keeps me from using them.

That sounds… bad? The whole point of rusts type system is to try to ensure safe memory usage. Opinions are opinions, but if I’m letting my runtime handle memory for me, I’d want a lighter weight, more expressive type system.

The whole reason I got interested in Rust in the first place was because of the type system. I viewed it as "Haskell types but with broad(er) adoption". The fact that it also has this neat non-GC but memory safe aspect was cool and all but not the main sell for me.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#165

Post by tirpen »

umvi wrote: post #158
sorenjan wrote: post #138

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do. > Updated to use modern pronouns. https://dada-lang.org/docs/about/

Is it still a quote in that case?

Yes, it's just a different translation of the original French quote.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#166

Post by mihaic »

I've written a bit of Rust, and I was left with mixed feelings, that seem to be still the same here: - loved the memory safety patterns when compared to the horrible things that you can do with C++ - found almost every thing where it was different to have a harder to parse syntax, that I could never get used to. The implicit return at the end of a statement for instance make it harder for me to visually parse what's being returned, since I really depend on that keyword.

Code in general is hard for me to mentally read. I know it sounds nitpicky, but to me all keywords should be obviously pronounceable, so something like "func" instead of "fn" would be mandatory. Also, using the permission keywords where I'd expect the type to be also seems a bit strange, as I'd imagine that keyword to prefix the variable -- that's just how I think though.

It does seem like less decorator magic and symbol-based syntax would make it easier for beginners to grasp.

I may sound like a curmudgeon, but I'd prefer only one type of language innovation at a time.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#167

Post by herval »

alphazard wrote: post #157
sorenjan wrote: post #138

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do. > Updated to use modern pronouns. https://dada-lang.org/docs/about/

I also noticed this, along with the warnings that Dada doesn't really exist yet (which is fine, thanks for the heads up). I predict this project will have its priorities backwards. There's a group of people who want to govern a programming language project, and inject their ideology into that structure, and maybe there's another group of avid language designers in there too. I think there are more of the first.

How do you “inject ideology” in a programming language?

Compiler error if the variable name is sexist?

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#168

Post by myko »

ursuscamp wrote: post #159
sorenjan wrote: post #138

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do. > Updated to use modern pronouns. https://dada-lang.org/docs/about/

As an avid fan of Rust, the Rust community is incredibly cringe about this topic.

Seems more cringe to complain about pronouns

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#169

Post by School-Cotton »

gpderetta wrote: post #62
School-Cotton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m assuming by rust’s type system they mean without lifetimes. In which case it’s existed in lots of GC languages (OCaml, Haskell) but no mainstream ones. It isn’t really related to needing a GC or not.

You still want RAII and unique references, but rely on GC for anything shared, as if you had a builtin refererence counted pointer. I do also believe this might be a sweet spot for a language, but the details might be hard to reconcile.

I haven’t used Swift so I might be totally wrong but doesn’t it work sort of like you describe? Though perhaps with ARC instead of true GC, if it followed in the footsteps of Objective-C.

Re: Dada, an experimental new programming language

#170

Post by rcxdude »

amw-zero wrote: post #73
gary17the wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do not want to mess with Rust borrow checker, you do not really need a garbage collector: you can rely on Rust reference counting. Use 1.) Rust reference-counted smart pointers[1] for shareable immutable references and 2.) Rust internal mutability[2] for non-shareable mutable references checked at runtime instead of compile time. Effectively, you will be writing kind of verbose Golang with Rust's expressivenes…

A language has a paved road, and when you go off of that road you are key with extreme annoyance and friction every step of the way. You’re telling people to just ignore the paved road of Rust, which is bad advice.

Reference counting and locks often is the easy path in Rust. It may not feel like it because of the syntax overhead, but I firmly believe it should be one of the first solutions on the list, not a last resort. People get way too fixed on trying to prove to the borrow checker that something or another is OK, because they feel like they need to make things fast, but it's rare that the overhead is actually relevant.
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