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I think the "separatist" side (yep I'm adopting your term) has already accepted that the war is lost, but I still see battles being waged often in programming l

by ratww 5y ago

I think the "separatist" side (yep I'm adopting your term) has already accepted that the war is lost, but I still see battles being waged often in programming language spec committees, whenever there's a suggestion for allowing if to be treated as an expression. The arguments against it are always that it requires having keywords that behave differently when being expressions or statements. Often the alternatives and compromises proposed always have the same issues, such as Javascript repurposing the do keyword for enclosing expression ifs.

ItsMonkk 5y ago
The intuition that I've built up is that most of the time that you have a debate that goes on for more than about 5 minutes, there's a problem at a different abstraction level. For instance with Imperial vs Metric System, Metric optimizes for multiplication, while Imperial optimizes for division. You can never unify these under the current system. But you can, if you change our base to base 12. Then they suddenly merge. With CLI vs GUI, we've realized that we needed a mixture. We need a GUI that runs through a CLI. And now we have that, it's called a website. I think tabs vs spaces was solved similarly, with tabs as spaces that editors config can treat n-straight-spaces as tabs. I'm firmly on the expression only and lots of functions sides, but that transcript is very interesting. You can already do local functions in C#, it seems to be implying that we should strive for that to be our mixture.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > The intuition that I've built up is that most of the time that you have a debate that goes on for more than about 5 minutes, there's a problem at a different abstraction level. I strongly agree. Also, that's poetically put. I'm saving this in my quotes file.