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Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

civet.dev

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Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#71

Post by lifthrasiir »

edemaine wrote: post #53
danpalmer wrote: post #6

Civet. 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 h…

I think you need to drop or at least weaken an inspiration from CoffeeScript if that's a goal, otherwise everyone will immediately draw a connection to that and overlook any other aspect of Civet. (I personally hate CoffeeScript especially for its indentation and that contributed to my initial reaction.) You can't solve this problem with simply supporting two radically different coding styles---the front page seems to prefer one over another anyway.

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#72

Post by mrj »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #37
danpalmer wrote: post #6

Civet. 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 not only a great idea but also successful beyond its adoption. It influenced and inspired many features that JavaScript later incorporated, such as arrow functions and destructuring assignments. Over time, JavaScript evolved to the point where the few quality of life improvements offered by CoffeeScript no longer justified learning an entirely new syntax.

Well, yeah that was expressly known about CoffeeScript. It pushed JS to the future and was expected to be not useful whenever JS gained more features, but that would take a long time. And some of the syntax features weren't adopted, which meant CoffeeScript seems like a different thing from JS but it wasn't intended to be a departure or permanent.

But JS moved faster and babel was made and eventually we could use JS-future even when browsers hadn't updated yet and CoffeeScript wasn't needed. But it was pretty easy to translate it to JS, commit that and keep rolling. CS was great at the time.

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#73

Post by Myrmornis »

danpalmer wrote: post #6

Civet. 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.…

That's a really mean / uncharitable take. As others have pointed out, coffeescript did a great job of moving the language in a good direction, and that's presumably exactly what's intended here.

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#74

Post by Myrmornis »

SSchick wrote: post #8

Really redminds me of coffeescript, lots of special syntax that doesn't really help readability? I have a hard time understanding the motivation of this project other than syntactic sugar-maxxing JS/TS.

The motivation is giving people a chance to try these features and thus ultimately helping move the language in a good direction. That's what coffeescript did also.

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#75

Post by lifthrasiir »

edemaine wrote: post #57
bhouston wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Python used an indentation-based syntax from the beginning and its syntax is particularly optimized for that. In particular, any block statement (formally, a statement followed by a "suite") would end with `:` and that's effectively the only place where a dangling `:` can happen [1], so you can easily recognize such statement from any directions.

In comparison, at least some people would find CoffeeScript and Civet to be hard to read because they solely rely on left-bearing indents. If my eye is pointing to the rightmost column and scanning to left, I wouldn't be sure about any nature of the line until the very first token and thus preceding indent is reached. This problem is not unique but can be somehow alleviated with some tweaks to the syntax. Ruby `if` for example is also prone to this issue but an explicit `end` token keeps it on track in most cases. CoffeeScript did nothing.

[1] The only other case is `lambda ...:` in parenthesized expressions. `lambda` in Python is quite exceptional in its syntax after all...

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#76

Post by Yahivin »

danpalmer wrote: post #6

Civet. 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.…

Something interesting I've found while designing Civet is that TypeScript actually mitigates in a lot of the downsides of CoffeeScript.

Types help quite a bit with implicit returns so you don't accidentally return an iteration results array from a void function.

They also help reduce the downsides of terse syntax, just hover over things in the IDE and see what they are. Missed a step in a pipeline? The IDE will warn you if there's a mismatch.

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#77

Post by Yahivin »

smt88 wrote: post #33
SSchick wrote: post #8

Really redminds me of coffeescript, lots of special syntax that doesn't really help readability? I have a hard time understanding the motivation of this project other than syntactic sugar-maxxing JS/TS.

Languages like this don't make sense anymore. You can just pick a mature, feature-rich language you like (Rust, Kotlin, Python, probably many more) and transpile to JS.

The GWT approach has its own downsides as well.

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#78

Post by scubbo »

keyle wrote: post #34

So make sure you introduce this in your company; become the subject expert in it, invite everyone to very cool sessions demonstrating how cool it is, and secure your job until the next rewrite! Looking at the examples, 1/5th of it looked neat, which probably would be best to submit a proposal for |> to the typescript committee rather than write another alienation. This is a solution looking for a problem to solve. It…

> It introduces an alternative and does so as a superset; which is not only dangerous to existing code bases...

How so?

Re: Civet: A Superset of TypeScript

#80

Post by smt88 »

Yahivin wrote: post #77
smt88 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages like this don't make sense anymore. You can just pick a mature, feature-rich language you like (Rust, Kotlin, Python, probably many more) and transpile to JS.

The GWT approach has its own downsides as well.

A) GWT is 20 years old and not similar to how modern transpilation works

B) What are the downsides?

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