221–230 of 387 posts
Reading half of it I'm struggling to see why they chose the semantic 'false?'. How do you read it? It sounds like a question, why not just 'false'?
AFAICT: Just "false" would be a regular boolean value. The question mark turns it into a logic value so it can be used in conditionals.
I still don’t get why people would want to type ‘:=‘ instead of just ‘=‘, but okay.
Confusion between '=' and '==' is a typical pain point that beginners have when learning to program. Plus it is super at odds with the notation we all learn in math. ':=' is didactically better because it shows that assignment has an direction. It also leaves '=' for actual equality.
I honestly fail to see what properties of the language has anything to do with the metaverse, or millions of devs, etc... At first I though the "choice" construct would be a way to distribute code execution among multiple computers (using the fact that in a grandiose metaverse, everything would be a connected computer with lots of compute time to spare ?) but there is not much detail. Also it's not obvious from the s…
> I honestly fail to see what properties of the language has anything to do with the metaverse, or millions of devs, etc... They're pushing transactions straight from the beginning, which I think is the sanest way for multiple actors to all try to interact with the same world. And for the compiler to stay sane in dealing with transactions, it's necessary to mark effects, which is also in the slides. The inclusion of…
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> 90% of C++'s useless standard library, The Python library is even larger and doesn't seem to be a barrier. If you know `std::vector`, ` > C++ would also not have been deprecated by Rust. That's an overstatement, to say the least.
In Python the standard library is fairly easily traversed and understood and if there's a better way of doing something it's usually linked I think. In C++ we have.. this.. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/transform_reduce
Naive question: Why does the metaverse have to have an economy?
The sequence and narrowing stuff looks super interesting though!
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In Icon a function ("procedure") can: fail, return a value, or "suspend" (yield) a value (and then again and again). The difference between returning and suspending being that a generator that returns cannot be resumed again. That difference was needed (IIRC) because the alternative would be to end the generator with failure, which could be confused with failure in a boolean sense. jq gets this better by saying that…
Boolean values are inherently a sign of an insufficient data model. Booleans carry no inherent meaning. They don't tell you where they came from or provide any context about what operations or data they are guarding. If your language lets you declare your own algebraic data types, there's no need to lean on a built-in Boolean type. You can create types that actually carry all the information you need so that pattern…
(meta) Interesting to go with what looks like Comic Sans in this day and age. Deliberate trolling?
Pretty much. Simon Peyton Jones has used for years, and if I recall correctly, he said that he just likes it, for whatever reason.
I'm not sure about the "learn it as a first language" bit. x:=(1|2); y:=(7|8); (x,y) This stuff just doesn't seem intuitive to me. It's not verbose enough to be obvious to someone who doesn't know what's going on. Looks interesting though; that's a really bright group of people. Be curious to see where their project ends up.
It's just more explaining, boring and driving people away.