This is pretty neat but I wonder how it compares to Arc...
Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
51–60 of 237 posts
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#52"Everything is an expression" is low-key nice.
Scala has it. Other languages too.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#53Civet. 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.…
One of the Civet devs here. To me, the main benefit of Civet is the ability to rapidly add useful features to the language, while preserving all the benefits of TS (tooling, etc.). We're constantly coming up with ideas — from TC39 proposals, other languages, or general brainstorming — and implementing them quickly. For example, we recently added pattern matching when catching exceptions, which took just a couple of hours of development; or Python-style from ... import ... for better autocompletion of imports. All of these features are optional; you can write well-formed TypeScript as usual, and just choose to use the features you think are worth the learning curve for readers. The plugins for VSCode, Vite, esbuild, Webpack, eslint, etc. aren't perfect, but they let Civet code enjoy most of the tooling out there.
I personally use Civet for all my coding projects, as I'm devoted to it continuing to flourish. But if you ever don't like what Civet is offering you, you can eject at any time by replacing your code with the TypeScript compilation, which we make as close as we can to your input.
What happens if a TC39 proposal is rejected? That's actually the good case for us, because it means we can keep the feature as is. Civet already transpiles all features to TypeScript, so they can live here forever if we think they're good. The trickier part is when Java/TypeScript changes in a way that's incompatible with Civet. Then we plan to change Civet to match Java/TypeScript, so that we don't diverge (though compiler flags allow us to also support the older form with explicit opt-in if we think it's worth doing so).
JavaScript and TypeScript move slow. Largely that's a good thing; they're a stable foundation, and we don't want to mess them up. But it's also exciting to be on the bleeding edge, explore new ideas, and obtain new features as quickly as we can design them, instead of waiting a decade. Many features are also too niche / add to much complexity for the general JavaScript language, but they're still fair game for languages that transpile to JavaScript. See also the recent JS0 vs. JSSugar discussion.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#54Interesting but not sure how much do I buy it. I would rather do with a stricter super set of TypeScript with some sugar/conveniences around its many verbose but useful features like branded types.
We're definitely looking for ways to improve ways to specify types! I think destructured typing [https://civet.dev/reference#destructured-typing] is already quite useful, especially for React. On the readability side, if/then/else [https://civet.dev/reference#conditional-types] seems easier to read than ?: ternaries, and "Partial Record Name, Info" seems easier to read than "Partial>" (implicit type arguments — https://civet.dev/reference#implicit-type-arguments). But we'd love to hear more ideas for features like branded types. Join us in Discord if you're interested!
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#55Am I the only one that really dislikes the syntax choices here?
I feel like there is a specific kind of person that likes all this, and there is very little overlap between those people and the people that choose to use Typescript. Kinda feels like someone was forced to work in Typescript and really wanted to scratch their own itch.
Nailed it
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#56Civet. 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.…
CoffeeScript was great except for a few fatal mistakes. The biggest was implicit variable declarations, which meant that to write maintainable code, you had to reintroduce explicit declarations via iifes. Otherwise, you’d risk a future code change introducing shadowing which would have consequences that were super painful to debug.
The other big one, which unfortunately Civet seems to be doing too, is implicit return combined with “everything is an expression”. You can have one of those, but not both. With both, it’s far too easy to write loops intended to be statements, and which accidentally turn into gigantic multi-dimensional array returns which can’t easily be optimized out by the compiler. Fortunately, this would be only mildly inconvenient to work around with a lint rule that forces explicit return in all functions.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#57This just looks like it's trying to remove as much syntax as possible and as a consequence makes it harder for me to follow what's going on. Kind of like a write-only language.
I do not particularly like the lack of brackets everywhere. I think it is hard to know precedence perfectly and brackets ensure you do not make stupid mistakes. Also there is the classic issue where you take an if statement that has a line one expression and you add a second line, but now because it didn't have brackets (and you are not using indentation style), you just introduced a bug. Or you have an if statement…
But we are using indentation style; that's one of the major design principles. In Civet, the body of an "if" can be multiple lines, and it's clear (from indentation) what they're nested under. Also, the body of an "if" statement can be empty, so if you comment out the body, the "if" doesn't apply to anything else. (This is an improvement over Python, which requires non-empty bodies, even if just to say "pass".)
I think there's a reason that Python is among the most popular programming languages, and part of it is the indentation-based syntax and lack of brackets. The core of Civet's syntax (originally inspired by CoffeeScript) is like a combination of JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, the two/three most popular programming languages.
But also, if you like brackets, you can include them! Most JavaScript/TypeScript code is also valid Civet. Just use the features you like.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#58What does this do? operator {min, max} := Math value min ceiling max floor Is that a declaration or an invocation?
It's doing a few things at once:
First line:
* `{min, max} := Math` is a destructuring declaration. It's similar to the destructuring assignment `{min, max} = Math` (i.e., `min = Math.min; max = Math.max`), but also declares min and max as const.
* The `operator` prefix means to treat min and max as new infix operators in the rest of the program.
Second line:
Given that min and max are infix operators, `value min ceiling max floor` is equivalent to `max(min(value, ceiling), floor)`. Yes, the latter is gross. That's why we like to write `value min ceiling max floor` instead. Think of it as "value minned with ceilling (i.e. capped at ceiling), then maxed with floor (i.e. prevented from going below floor)".
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#59The JSX seems compelling. You are already doing a non-standard HTML embedding HTML into javascript, why not do it better? https://civet.dev/reference#jsx I am not convinced that all the syntax nicety is necessary, but improved pattern matching is often a great thing. On the other hand their examples seem to be to pattern match on highly dynamic types, which you can avoid 95% of the time with TypeScript.
JSX has a spec. This thing they're doing... I don't know what it is, but it ain't JSX.
Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript
#60Civet reminds me of Coffeescript but now in TypeScript. This has made me even more convinced that the future of JavaScript is JavaScript. We will be seeing JavaScript (natively) having all the types, features and proposals that TypeScript has and the industry will eventually move on from TypeScript.
I feel like typescript would officially deprecate itself if that ever happened. But I also feel like that won't ever happen. It would be cool if ES would get optional type annotations or something, even if they were ignored at runtime. But someone would still want a static type checker. TS does that, and if there's nothing to replace that part, then TS still has a viable mission statement.