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Thank you for your detailed response and the great article. I'm interested in whether the focus on tooling as one of the priorities ended up informing elements
by UglyToad 7y ago
Thank you for your detailed response and the great article.
I'm interested in whether the focus on tooling as one of the priorities ended up informing elements of the language design. To take an example mentioned elsewhere, autocomplete is (generally) easier to implement for OO languages than FP ones because the dot syntax for method calls helps scope the options.
Are there instances where you've changed design or felt constrained by making it work with tools?
- nickmqb 7y agoOne design decision that comes to mind is Muon's significant whitespace. Having that makes it much easier to do parser error recovery, which in turn made it easier to build the language server. Another one is that I initially had the rule that all typenames had to start with a capital letter, and nothing else could. Which simplified parsing even further, but turned out to be too restrictive, so I got rid of that. Your question is something I've wondered about too. How can the design of a language co-evolve with its tools? If you have pointers to existing research on this I would be interested to learn about it.
- daxfohl 7y agoOoh, great question and answer. I'd never thought of that advantage of significant whitespace.