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> I highly recommend that you try out a language with good support for option/maybe types Right. Like Perl 6. > Very often, your error handling through a chai

by raiph 9y ago

> I highly recommend that you try out a language with good support for option/maybe types Right. Like Perl 6. > Very often, your error handling through a chain of operations will be to use a slightly different operator (say '?.' Instead of '.') and any errors will be automatically propagated to the end of that section of code where you can handle them all in one place. P6 does this stuff particularly well. It makes option types opt out. You have to explicitly specify the equivalents of Just or None, otherwise you're automatically dealing with an option type if you're dealing with a type. Conditional constructs are designed to work well in this context. One can use ML style pattern matching as those conditional constructs. And other styles of matching. Error exceptions are unified with error values, allowing codebase/author A to use one style, and B to use the other but pretend that A's code used B's style, and for C to use B's code in whichever style they prefer, seamlessly promoting/demoting between warnings, errors, and exceptions, including across language boundaries, as fits a use case. And so on. Perl 6 learned from Perl 5 but it also learned from Haskell and many other languages. > Alternatively, give Erlang or Elixir a shot Note that the author of the OP is well known in the Erlang community.

Arcsech 9y ago
How is "opt-out option types" different from, say, Java, where everything is nullable and all the problems that come with that? Honest question, as I haven't had a chance to look into P6 as much as I would like. It looks pretty cool in a lot of ways, but I'm worried that all of the options available would create a confusing mess. > Note that the author of the OP is well known in the Erlang community. Yeah, my comment was directed at the parent who asked: > I don't understand how some other language would not need to handle all the errors ? And was intending to give a brief description of how other languages (possibly including P6, though I don't have the experience to say) handle errors differently from the languages they listed (go/java/php/python/js).
- raiph 9y ago
  > How is "opt-out option types" different from, say, Java, where everything is nullable and all the problems that come with that? Aiui the Java compiler and language constructs generally don't know the difference. The P6 Nothing isn't a null, it's a "type object" with memory- and type- safe behavior. There's a tiny bit more about this at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type#Perl_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type#Perl_6

by raiph 9y ago

Arcsech 9y ago

How is "opt-out option types" different from, say, Java, where everything is nullable and all the problems that come with that? Honest question, as I haven't had a chance to look into P6 as much as I would like. It looks pretty cool in a lot of ways, but I'm worried that all of the options available would create a confusing mess. > Note that the author of the OP is well known in the Erlang community. Yeah, my comment was directed at the parent who asked: > I don't understand how some other language would not need to handle all the errors ? And was intending to give a brief description of how other languages (possibly including P6, though I don't have the experience to say) handle errors differently from the languages they listed (go/java/php/python/js).

raiph 9y ago
> How is "opt-out option types" different from, say, Java, where everything is nullable and all the problems that come with that? Aiui the Java compiler and language constructs generally don't know the difference. The P6 Nothing isn't a null, it's a "type object" with memory- and type- safe behavior. There's a tiny bit more about this at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type#Perl_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type#Perl_6