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Yeah, 'int is iterable' triggered "oh that's cute!" immediately followed by "... and the exact sort of cute I often find irresistably tempting myself and then r

by mst 2y ago

Yeah, 'int is iterable' triggered "oh that's cute!" immediately followed by "... and the exact sort of cute I often find irresistably tempting myself and then regret later." My current thing in progress has basically all of its temptation points already spent because I decided I was going to make it fexpr based, but I'm very definitely having fun with that so far - "no special forms required" makes for some interesting possibilities. (kernel-lisp and kernel-thesis in /lisp/ are worth looking at if fexprs sound interesting, though I'm on the pragmatics side of things and will not pretend I came anywhere close to understanding the $vau calculus part)

codr7 2y ago
A certain level of helpfulness is nice though, Ruby and to a somewhat lesser extent Perl get that part right. I guess Perl could be seen as a warning example of what happens if you go all in. Yep, I've been on a ride down the fexpr implementation hole previously; which is another reason I've been delaying user macros; still processing the experience.
- mst 2y ago
  There's a bunch of stuff in perl that's best restricted to one-liner or short script usage - i.e. the sort of cases where you're using it for the early inspiration super-awk purposes. Writing perl as a programming language is, I find, a very different dialect, and perhaps amusingly one in which I rely on function composition, closures and block scoping heavily due to also loving lisp - javascript's 'let' behaves very similarly to perl's 'my' and I find it ... difficult ... to deal with python or ruby for any length of time since their scoping is "stuff randomly pops into existence at function scope" and, just, aaaaa. Perl of course can't really have macros, but it does have the ability to define custom (also block scoped :) keywords which can allow one to achieve similar results - see e.g. https://p3rl.org/Keyword::Declare https://p3rl.org/Keyword::Declare for a demonstration built on top of that functionality (there's also a code rewriter called Babble but I got distracted so while it works, it's woefully underdocumented, keep forgetting to get back to that). I've always had a fondness for the "building the language up towards the problem" style of programming (I wrote the first ever proof of concept for custom perl keywords, though that code has happily long since been obsoleted by people who knew what they were doing) which has led me to 'fexprs for making DSLs' since those are usually building up a config structure or similar which makes fexprs' being tricky to optimise less of an obstacle. (also with fexprs I don't have to limit myself to 'block in front' ala perl or 'block at the end' ala ruby/elixir (though it's amazing how much mileage elixir gets out of its macros, Kernel.ex is well worth a read if you're so inclined))

by mst 2y ago

codr7 2y ago

A certain level of helpfulness is nice though, Ruby and to a somewhat lesser extent Perl get that part right. I guess Perl could be seen as a warning example of what happens if you go all in. Yep, I've been on a ride down the fexpr implementation hole previously; which is another reason I've been delaying user macros; still processing the experience.

mst 2y ago
There's a bunch of stuff in perl that's best restricted to one-liner or short script usage - i.e. the sort of cases where you're using it for the early inspiration super-awk purposes. Writing perl as a programming language is, I find, a very different dialect, and perhaps amusingly one in which I rely on function composition, closures and block scoping heavily due to also loving lisp - javascript's 'let' behaves very similarly to perl's 'my' and I find it ... difficult ... to deal with python or ruby for any length of time since their scoping is "stuff randomly pops into existence at function scope" and, just, aaaaa. Perl of course can't really have macros, but it does have the ability to define custom (also block scoped :) keywords which can allow one to achieve similar results - see e.g. https://p3rl.org/Keyword::Declare https://p3rl.org/Keyword::Declare for a demonstration built on top of that functionality (there's also a code rewriter called Babble but I got distracted so while it works, it's woefully underdocumented, keep forgetting to get back to that). I've always had a fondness for the "building the language up towards the problem" style of programming (I wrote the first ever proof of concept for custom perl keywords, though that code has happily long since been obsoleted by people who knew what they were doing) which has led me to 'fexprs for making DSLs' since those are usually building up a config structure or similar which makes fexprs' being tricky to optimise less of an obstacle. (also with fexprs I don't have to limit myself to 'block in front' ala perl or 'block at the end' ala ruby/elixir (though it's amazing how much mileage elixir gets out of its macros, Kernel.ex is well worth a read if you're so inclined))