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I endorse this. I've known about the majority of these points since I learned Scheme in college back around 1995. My thoughts have solidified and remained most

I endorse this. I've known about the majority of these points since I learned Scheme in college back around 1995. My thoughts have solidified and remained mostly unchanged since around 2015 as I've watched web development eat itself. For example: PHP is one of the only languages that got pass-by-value right, other than maybe Clojure. It even passes arrays by value, using copy-on-write internally to only make copies of elements if they're changed. Unfortunately that triumph was forgotten when classes were added, passed by reference of course, putting the onus on the developer to get things right, just like every other mediocre language. Javascript got the poison pill of async, Ruby is Ruby, and I have so many disparaging things to say about mainstream frameworks that it's probably best I don't say anything at all. My only (minor) disagreement with the article is that I do want reflection, so probably need some kind of type info at runtime, ideally with low or no storage overhead. If that's a dealbreaker, at least make it available during development or have a way to transpile that into a formal implementation, maybe something like Lisp and C macros.

girvo 5y ago
PHP was one of the first languages that I learned, and used professionally for years. I agree with you RE. pass-by-value; even to this day I find it annoying in other languages that I need to remember their particular quirks around that.
redbar0n 5y ago
What would be the main motivation for reflection? I’d like to be convinced it is fundamentally necessary, or just worth it, given the potential for introducing footguns.
- mind-blight 5y ago
  The main place I've seen these be useful is in ORMs. Metaprogramming allows you to decouple the business logic from the plumbing of query construction and memoizing, while maintaining syntax that most people are comfortable with. Django ORM did a really good job with this. JS Proxy classes also use reflection. Check out the immer library for an awesome example of how those can be used to make coffee drinker to read and reason about. Reflection should be used very rarely, but it's an amazing tool when it's the right tool
- zackmorris 5y ago
  Oh I'm looking at the development side, being able to iterate quickly and having full visibility of the code. This fits in with stuff like aspect-oriented-programming (AOP) so that things like execution traces can be generated at runtime without modifying code. I mostly work with the shell and scripting languages. I'm racing as fast as I can all day to get anything at all to work, then building on that to get to a solution. Most of the time, I can't really edit the code I'm working with and still maintain velocity, so can't do any kind of manual type annotation. Also I question if there is really any merit to hiding the type of a variable at runtime. It feels like a power trip by the language, a form of security theater. I also view the "private" and "final" keywords with similar skepticism. If I can call typeof on an element in my own struct/class, then I get frustrated when I can't do that with anonymous data from a framework or in the REPL. It also frustrates me when I can't access the call stack or get information about the calling function. If there's a way to do it in C++ (no matter how ugly), then I must be able to do it in whatever language I'm using or my psyche views it as stifling and I lose motivation. I guess I find the obsession with types today to be a form of pedantry. So much concern for only accepting a narrow range of shapes, but then holding that info close to the chest. It should be the opposite. That's also the reason why I've gotten away from object-oriented (OO) programming. I've found that functional programming (FP) on JSON types (number, string, etc), and doing declarative programming in a data-driven way, usually runs circles around the boilerplate/interface yak shaving of OO. Object-Oriented Programming is Bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM Simple Made Easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8

girvo 5y ago

PHP was one of the first languages that I learned, and used professionally for years. I agree with you RE. pass-by-value; even to this day I find it annoying in other languages that I need to remember their particular quirks around that.

redbar0n 5y ago

What would be the main motivation for reflection? I’d like to be convinced it is fundamentally necessary, or just worth it, given the potential for introducing footguns.

mind-blight 5y ago
The main place I've seen these be useful is in ORMs. Metaprogramming allows you to decouple the business logic from the plumbing of query construction and memoizing, while maintaining syntax that most people are comfortable with. Django ORM did a really good job with this. JS Proxy classes also use reflection. Check out the immer library for an awesome example of how those can be used to make coffee drinker to read and reason about. Reflection should be used very rarely, but it's an amazing tool when it's the right tool
zackmorris 5y ago
Oh I'm looking at the development side, being able to iterate quickly and having full visibility of the code. This fits in with stuff like aspect-oriented-programming (AOP) so that things like execution traces can be generated at runtime without modifying code. I mostly work with the shell and scripting languages. I'm racing as fast as I can all day to get anything at all to work, then building on that to get to a solution. Most of the time, I can't really edit the code I'm working with and still maintain velocity, so can't do any kind of manual type annotation. Also I question if there is really any merit to hiding the type of a variable at runtime. It feels like a power trip by the language, a form of security theater. I also view the "private" and "final" keywords with similar skepticism. If I can call typeof on an element in my own struct/class, then I get frustrated when I can't do that with anonymous data from a framework or in the REPL. It also frustrates me when I can't access the call stack or get information about the calling function. If there's a way to do it in C++ (no matter how ugly), then I must be able to do it in whatever language I'm using or my psyche views it as stifling and I lose motivation. I guess I find the obsession with types today to be a form of pedantry. So much concern for only accepting a narrow range of shapes, but then holding that info close to the chest. It should be the opposite. That's also the reason why I've gotten away from object-oriented (OO) programming. I've found that functional programming (FP) on JSON types (number, string, etc), and doing declarative programming in a data-driven way, usually runs circles around the boilerplate/interface yak shaving of OO. Object-Oriented Programming is Bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM Simple Made Easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8