I lot more Ruby-like than Python. Not sure why it both has ":" and "end" and the "|" is kinda ugly the way it's used.
Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
51–60 of 288 posts
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#52"""Pyret makes testing a natural part of the programming process. Functions can end in a where: clause that holds unit tests for the function. These assertions are checked dynamically.""" Fantastic idea! I'll keep that in mind, should be fairly easy to extend Lisps or other AST-Macro enabled languages (Elixir, Julia, Python) with such a functionality. I really like that. It makes it easy to work on a function and cod…
D has something like this[1]. It might have come from a still-earlier language. [1] http://dlang.org/unittest.html
My biggest gripe with these is the inability to name the tests. What exactly is a unittest block testing for? You need to rely on comments or read the test code where none exists. Doesn't seem like Pyret fixed that issue.
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#53"""Pyret makes testing a natural part of the programming process. Functions can end in a where: clause that holds unit tests for the function. These assertions are checked dynamically.""" Fantastic idea! I'll keep that in mind, should be fairly easy to extend Lisps or other AST-Macro enabled languages (Elixir, Julia, Python) with such a functionality. I really like that. It makes it easy to work on a function and cod…
AST-Macro enabled languages (... Python) What?! You can't write macros in Python? (right? have I missed something?)
Indeed you can https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#54This doesn't seem like it would be easy for novices to grasp, though it looks like a solid language. For teaching, I think Quorum (http://www.quorumlanguage.com) seems like a stronger alternative (disclosure, I am a member of a CS senior project team building their web system).
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#55Python-like syntax with pattern matching and recursive ADTs!? What a great idea!
+1 This looks a lot like the language I've been dreaming about. I actually like the explicit `end` keyword to materialize the end of blocks. The lambda expression syntax, as illustrated by the filter/map/fold example, looks like Ruby blocks with a much simpler syntax. A couple of questions to the crew: Why advertise it as a teaching language ? As a working programmer this looks very appealing to me. Are there limitat…
It's not my language, so I can't really talk to those questions. I think it's fair to say that the Racket group has always been focused on teaching languages not to exclude "production languages" but instead because it's of their personal interest and lets them focus on certain aspects of the language to exclusion of others. They don't need to build performant standard libraries---they need to cleanly introduce good programming concepts.
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#56Pyret looks like a there's a lot going on, based on the examples. It has implicit returns, special purpose syntax for data structures, iterators, assertions, refinements, etc. Having support for more stuff makes it less suitable as a teaching language, not more. Pyret looks like a has the good bits of Python plus a whole bunch of other cool stuff. But the language is pretty complex as a result. Cool? Yup! Good for te…
Actually Brown teaches Intro to Programming Languages using Pyret. http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2013/software.html
By looks of the course number, this is a third or fourth year elective for undergrads. It seems that what is being taught here is the design and engineering of programming languages, not programming itself.
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It clutters the code. Tests are a form of documentation, but too much in the code, like too many comments, obscures. Higher level unit tests (acceptance tests) can be quite long, especially if there's a lot of setup - unlike their example code. Literate programming tried embedded documentation, but didn't catch on (even with Knuth's backing). Embedding tests makes them easier to keep in sync, but tests are already ke…
I don't think the story of literate programming can be of any help predicting how well this idea here can work out. Literate programming is not "embedding documentation". The main idea was to separate the order in which the code is read from the order in which the compiler sees it, and it embeds the code in the documentation, not vice versa. It was a very idiosyncratic thing, hard to imagine a team of programmers in…
That's not the "main idea". Originally, it was a part of the suggested way to accomplish the goal ... but the main idea is this:
> Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs:
> Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what
> to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we
> want a computer to do.
> — Knuth
Hopefully, it's clear how a program written in such a way could potentially be beneficial to a large team, trying to understand, modify, and improve it.
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#58Why the superfluous syntax? I think remembering syntax like this is orthogonal to the goal of being easy to learn. The syntax is basically Ruby + Python + Haskell. Each of those languages has a lighter, more intuitive and memorable syntax. Why would the syntax be: data BinTree: | leaf | node(value, left, right) end Instead of just data BinTree = leaf | node(value, left, right) The whole colon thing in Python is a mis…
I think the colon isn't a mistake, it clearly delineates an indented block; I think it's a great marker that indented languages might want to standardize on. Perhaps syntax issue is that it has both a colon and an "end" marker? The former indicates indentation-based syntax, the latter is often used in white-space agnostic contexts. The result of using both is confusion.
Pyret doesn't actually have an indentation-based format (so far as I know) it just happens to look like python.
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually Brown teaches Intro to Programming Languages using Pyret. http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2013/software.html
By looks of the course number, this is a third or fourth year elective for undergrads. It seems that what is being taught here is the design and engineering of programming languages, not programming itself.
That's correct - 173 is definitely not an intro course. But, we also are teaching an intro course with it:
Re: Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket
#60Those "new" languages keep looking more and more like BASIC.