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The first | in the third example, i.e. {|x| ...}, is redundant. This is the first thing I noticed when I first read up about Ruby over 10 years ago, and it put

by vorg 15y ago

The first | in the third example, i.e. {|x| ...}, is redundant. This is the first thing I noticed when I first read up about Ruby over 10 years ago, and it put me off what I now know is a fairly good language. The same thing happened with the leading __ and trailing __ for certain names in Python. Syntax matters as newcomers notice it.

kibwen 15y ago
I don't know about Ruby, but it's not redundant in Rust; you can enclose arbitrary expressions in braces, and | is the bitwise OR operator, and Rust allows implicit returns such that the following is the identity closure: {|x| x} Trying to rewrite this in your syntax as: {x| x} could cause ambiguity if you had defined a variable x somewhere up-scope: is that a bitwise OR or is it a closure? True, the correct behavior could probably (maybe?) be inferred from context, but that might require Rust to switch from a simple LR(1) parser to an arbitrary-lookahead parser, which would inflate compilation times. In any case, Ruby's hamburger-notation for closures is well-known by this point, and I'd hardly call it novel anymore. In the case of Python's __special__ methods, the whole point was to discourage people from heavily using them in the first place. Making ugly operations ugly, as it were. Your point that newcomers might be turned off by a language's syntax remains valid, but you've also demonstrated that newcomers lack the context necessary to be aware of the tradeoffs necessary in language design. But hey, tough shit for language developers, huh? Yes, tough shit indeed. Languages must be familiar enough to attract people, but they must also be sufficiently expressive enough to retain the interest of the people in the community who really matter (the elite hackers and the devoted evangelists), while at the same time seeming novel enough to justify switching away from whatever language you were previously using in that domain. TL;DR: It's a thorny issue, and simply saying "syntax matters" is an unjust simplification. :)

by vorg 15y ago

kibwen 15y ago

I don't know about Ruby, but it's not redundant in Rust; you can enclose arbitrary expressions in braces, and | is the bitwise OR operator, and Rust allows implicit returns such that the following is the identity closure: {|x| x} Trying to rewrite this in your syntax as: {x| x} could cause ambiguity if you had defined a variable x somewhere up-scope: is that a bitwise OR or is it a closure? True, the correct behavior could probably (maybe?) be inferred from context, but that might require Rust to switch from a simple LR(1) parser to an arbitrary-lookahead parser, which would inflate compilation times. In any case, Ruby's hamburger-notation for closures is well-known by this point, and I'd hardly call it novel anymore. In the case of Python's __special__ methods, the whole point was to discourage people from heavily using them in the first place. Making ugly operations ugly, as it were. Your point that newcomers might be turned off by a language's syntax remains valid, but you've also demonstrated that newcomers lack the context necessary to be aware of the tradeoffs necessary in language design. But hey, tough shit for language developers, huh? Yes, tough shit indeed. Languages must be familiar enough to attract people, but they must also be sufficiently expressive enough to retain the interest of the people in the community who really matter (the elite hackers and the devoted evangelists), while at the same time seeming novel enough to justify switching away from whatever language you were previously using in that domain. TL;DR: It's a thorny issue, and simply saying "syntax matters" is an unjust simplification. :)