 There's a lot of hand-waving at and against programming languages with reduced specs these days, things like: > A language or tool which prioritizes its own implementation or specification over the interface it presents to users will never be easy or enable its users to achieve simplicity as they must wrangle the remainder of complexity from the incomplete tool. Such a tool is at best superficially simple. Ergo, checkmate forth. 25 comments
Oh god, no types, no objects? what, are we to live like savages. We couldn't POSSIBLY write anything without cluttering ourselves with a billion training wheels.  @neauoire there's a lot tangled up here - types, objects, w/e, are ways of designing interface contracts between moving parts. Imagine this argument applied to electrical: oh no, we don't have NEMA sockets? However will we work! Besides, it's just bare AC wires, how bad could it be? Sorry, I like knowing my toaster will plug into the wall without reading its schematics, I'll stick to things that make it hard to kill myself Npm culture (downthread) is a very different set of problems than this @csepp mhmm, but how are types helping to make things generic, don't take make things NOT generic?  @neauoire Say you want to implement substring matching. How do you make sure it doesn't need to know about the in-memory layout of strings? Like, how will it work on both arrays and ropes? And sure, you can copy-paste the code, or reimplement it for each data structure, but human time is more important than computer time. @csepp damn, I guess I never really had to solve that sort of thing, I'm not sure I understand what you're asking me in the first question. @csepp I'm just ranting over here, but maybe all these people are solving problems I haven't had to contend with yet too. If that's the case it's a bit frustrating to see them take hits at projects that tackle different scales of problems that shouldn't be hindered by the tools they need for their scale of problems~ @neauoire In more concrete terms, you have code that only cares if its input can be indexed randomly, or maybe iterated in sequence. A simple example is something like grep. If it's generic enough, you could grep through RAM, or through messages streaming through a network socket. But yeah, some people just don't realize others have different needs. Favoring compiler simplicity is entirely valid if you want to self host on simple hardware. @aeva actually this is not about Uxn, it's using forth as an example of what they call "pseudo-simplicity", I'm seeing these little jabs at languages that are a bit more domain specific. Using terms like "church of minimalism" has this reactionary connotation like more languages is worst somehow, and that different scopes can't coexist. @neauoire It is entirely possible to create such abstractions in Uxntal or in Forth for that matter. In Scheme that has been the custom forever. So the criticism would then move to "but they aren't native" or something like that. It's to my mind an idle debate, because what people are really saying is "I like what I know and I don't like change" @wim_v12e I totally agree, it's like, it's all things that can be done, if a language made it harder or impossible to create these data structures then I can see a point here, but each time something is added to the core, then everyone has to carry this extra weight.   @neauoire this is a rich hickey quote right? he's a smart person but i find a lot of his arguments to be misleading and sort of self-serving to be honest @d6 Reid D. McKenzie. But it's just one example, there's thousands of others like him where he comes from. @eris It's a rephrasing of some of the ideas from this paper, which I'm trying to figure out what I feel about this. @neauoire I'm guessing this author isn't counting the complexity of the language and run-time their preferred technology is built on. Building on 1M+ lines of highly tested language and standard library is a great way to make user code appear simple, but at the cost of pulling in a bunch of irrelevant generality, nice-to-have features, and astonishing security holes that your user code didn't want or need. Ergo, checkmate 1M+ line programming ecosystems. But I'm preaching to the choir, here. |
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How does it follows that a simple specs equates a hindering interfaces, why do they always make this leap.
I mean, okay perhaps brainfuck and subleq is a bit to close to the tarpit side of things, but how much convenience does one really need to be effective at solving any one programming task? Don't most simple programming languages and assemblies give enough for any one to build the things they need.
Is it because programmers are dead set in using abstractions they deem not worthy to learn?