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Oh. I find subject-verb-object interface another dimension of debate altogether. Usual it's being mentioned by FP devs, since they are usually very aware of tha

by dpc_pw 6y ago

Oh. I find subject-verb-object interface another dimension of debate altogether. Usual it's being mentioned by FP devs, since they are usually very aware of that aspect since they don't get to use it. :D It's not only that SVO is more suited from linguistic reasons. Selecting the "object/doer/subject" first is just a better UX in all sorts of human-interfaces (e.g. games). It allows narrowing down the context naturally, improving discoverability (like auto-completion). Big part of the reason why I switched from Vim to Kakoune. Subject serves the purpose of being a mini namespace/module and context for operations. In a way, I blame FP community for being so stubborn in their mathematically-inclined notation, and not experimenting enough with trying to achieve similar human-friendly notation. But maybe I'm just missing all the historical attempts or something. One of the most interesting spins on the topic is "subject-oriented programming" from Hoon (which is native PL for Urbit OS), where every expression is always evaluated in ever-present implicit subject context, and results in a new subject which will be used for the next expression.

alquemist 6y ago
Speculation. The FP community prizes mathematical beauty, for which symmetry is an important factor. It is simply ugly to promote one function argument (which one?) to a privileged role, even if the linguistic side of the brain screams that's the right thing to do. Re autocomplete, there is no technical reason why auto-complete couldn't trim down the search space based on the arguments of the functions, for example by using reverse polish. But reverse polish is unusual, we really like SVO anyways, and modules as subjects are very useful, if only as an autocomplete anchor, in tooling or in one's brain. OOP/SVO is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and embracing pure functions principle makes it rather pleasant to work with. If only we could decouple 'modules as namespaces' useful idea from all the misguided baggage that comes bundled with OOP, of which the 'active data' antipattern deserves special 'please avoid' mention.

by dpc_pw 6y ago

alquemist 6y ago

Speculation. The FP community prizes mathematical beauty, for which symmetry is an important factor. It is simply ugly to promote one function argument (which one?) to a privileged role, even if the linguistic side of the brain screams that's the right thing to do. Re autocomplete, there is no technical reason why auto-complete couldn't trim down the search space based on the arguments of the functions, for example by using reverse polish. But reverse polish is unusual, we really like SVO anyways, and modules as subjects are very useful, if only as an autocomplete anchor, in tooling or in one's brain. OOP/SVO is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and embracing pure functions principle makes it rather pleasant to work with. If only we could decouple 'modules as namespaces' useful idea from all the misguided baggage that comes bundled with OOP, of which the 'active data' antipattern deserves special 'please avoid' mention.