5 ms·

What’s the gain from using that over just using python?

anonzzzies 2y ago
I don't think Rhombus is python style. And this won't convert anyone anyway; it's experimenting with new language constructs and such which is what racket is used for by most who use it. In many years from now, the lesson learned by these experiments might end up in a new language that might get converts and even rival python/js (I hope so, I find both terrible).
- kamaal 2y ago
  I was skeptical about Rhombus in the past. But as it turns out making new programming languages is the whole point behind Racket. This not supposed to be a production use language, think of it more like used to teach, and experiment with programming language features. To that end, it will be used by its target audience(i.e, teachers and researchers)
1attice 2y ago
A lot of folks (including me) find Python limiting for non-trivial use cases. The One Python Way was a great selling point in 2004, but the thing is, it's still basically the same Way in 2024. So, I hope you like nerfed lambdas and inheritance
- 1attice 2y ago
  Expanding on this point (because it's important): A lot of folks (including me) find Python limiting for non-trivial use cases. The One Python Way was a great selling point in 2004, but the thing is, it's still basically the same Way in 2024, and the fact that the language has been designed so exhaustively to ensure that there is only one correct way to do stuff, there has never been room for evolution. (Insufficient entropy!) I'm going to compare it to JavaScript/TypeScript, because it's what I know best in 2024, and because it's an engaging contrast; yet the take-home message is also applicable to other languages, such as Rhombus (which looks cool!) Python feels timeless to me, like Roman majuscules. It was, in its day, brilliant: cleaner than Java, saner than Perl, and just so, so hackable. The strong Pythonic cultural rejection of Perl's 'more than one way to do it' dictum was powerfully clarificatory; we didn't have StackOverflow, and the _good_ technical resources were still all in physical books, so being able to learn one pretty-good way of expressing a concept or pattern was magical. But, like roman majusucles, Python didn't evolve, because it didn't have to. The marginal cost of change threatened the original value proposition, so it just didn't really ever happen. By contrast, while e.g. JavaScript had to evolve, because it was gobsmackingly bad, the necessity of that evolution has made made JavaScript (as a community and language) open to variation, change, competing paradigms, and imports from academe and research. Evolution loves a mess. TypeScript, for example, happened nearly overnight, and as a result of it and other innovations, I can spend my day working blissfully in algebraic types, doing frigging set theory to do precise type hinting, and passing around pure functions and immutable structures. My code runs everywhere, and my coding style is always changing (improving!), and the only real price I've had to pay is learning some regrettable nonsense about an extra '=' in my comparison operators, and maybe the idiocy of having both `undefined` and `null` types. Whereas, when I peep the pythonista channels at my work, I notice they are still having essentially the same conversation about eliminating the GIL that I remember them having in 2007 (yes I am old.) Which is not to say that Python is _bad_, per se; there are obvious advantages to having an imperfect but opinionated lingua franca, and I'd sure rather be thrown into an unfamiliar Python codebase from 10 years ago than an unfamiliar JavaScript codebase of an equivalent age. Yet I'll warrant that Python's long summer of success, combined with its one-way-to-do-it culture, close the mind and the imagination, and will eventually make it less fit-for-purpose than its competition. It will remain in use, and it will even find new contexts (machine learning, say) but 'the code part of the codebase' will be done in other languages. I suspect Python will, thanks to its exceptional readability and regularity, become a configuration language --- a part of the UI, essentially, a sort of shell. It will also continue to be a language used to teach programming. Hanging on here and there, sort of like how Latin hangs around in biology and medicine. But legacy Python codebases, thanks to that very readability, will probably be rewritten sooner rather than later. Standards (Latin, Python) are _useful_, and _timeless_ standards are some of the most valuable artifacts humans have ever produced. But it's the Innovator's Dilemma for sure.
  - smokel 2y ago
    Hm, I don't think the "one way of doing things" koan holds up in practice, other than being a nice narrative. Nearly all other languages strive for doing things in one way, it is not something that makes Python unique. In fact, Python typically offers a complete mess of ways in which to solve something. Classes are sometimes good, sometimes they're not. Lists or Numpy arrays or Torch tensors, the choice depends mostly on performance, not on style. And Python is evolving. There is optional type checking for instance.
    - mkesper 2y ago
      The 'one way of doing things' mantra must be seen against the crazy ways of Perl (and later Ruby).
      - 1attice 2y ago
        Just so. Code written in Python has always had the virtue of being _incredibly boring_, which is a virtue that, at the time of its inception, was criminally undervalued; this was, after all, the heyday of C++, and if you weren't bringing operator overloading and multiple inheritance and generics to the table, the hipsters sniffed. For example, no one complained that Python had multiple inheritance; instead, we thought this was _a point in its favour_, over and against Java. (I imagine Guido added it grudgingly as a vox-populi.) Thus, the Pythonic mindset emerged as a sort of 'refusal of the call', sort of like Indiana Jones shooting the sword guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo). You could be against the hermetic complexity of Perl, but do it better than Java! Neat! These days, however, I suspect that Python, while still boring, is boring in the _wrong_ way, leaving opportunities for concision, clarity and performance on the table -- now-basic stuff like immutable datatypes, monads, tail recursion, concatenative programming, and so on. Python is the hobbit that stayed in Hobbiton.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    I can't tell what you mean concretely, because the two examples you give -- gradual typing and lack of concurrently executing threads -- are common to both languages. Python has support for gradual typing, and JavaScript is single-threaded (which is an even stronger property than having a GIL).
- fire_lake 2y ago
  I totally agree but always find myself in a very small minority when expressing this. People love Python and I don’t understand it. For me the issue is that one cannot write in a “light functional programming” style in Python. The language lacks many simple things, but chief of them is multi-line lambdas! In 2024 I’m very surprised that people aren’t clamouring for this.
  - BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
    Ignoring the social benefits (which is easily the biggest draw of the language), Python feels really optimal for quick, simple tasks. The language lends itself to not overthinking it and building simple solutions.
vintermann 2y ago
Macros, ease of making internal DSLs a la Haskell?
baq 2y ago
macros.
ashton314 2y ago
Best-in-class macros! Rhombus makes metaprogramming safe and fun. Rhombus uses RRB trees for its native list structure: immutable data type with O(log32(n)) random access and functional update. Really amazing data structure. Also, the Rhombus compiler isn’t the quickest right now (still in development) but once compiled, it’s generally much faster than Python. (Though that’s not hard.)

I don't think Rhombus is python style. And this won't convert anyone anyway; it's experimenting with new language constructs and such which is what racket is used for by most who use it. In many years from now, the lesson learned by these experiments might end up in a new language that might get converts and even rival python/js (I hope so, I find both terrible).

kamaal 2y ago
I was skeptical about Rhombus in the past. But as it turns out making new programming languages is the whole point behind Racket. This not supposed to be a production use language, think of it more like used to teach, and experiment with programming language features. To that end, it will be used by its target audience(i.e, teachers and researchers)

1attice 2y ago

A lot of folks (including me) find Python limiting for non-trivial use cases. The One Python Way was a great selling point in 2004, but the thing is, it's still basically the same Way in 2024. So, I hope you like nerfed lambdas and inheritance

1attice 2y ago
Expanding on this point (because it's important): A lot of folks (including me) find Python limiting for non-trivial use cases. The One Python Way was a great selling point in 2004, but the thing is, it's still basically the same Way in 2024, and the fact that the language has been designed so exhaustively to ensure that there is only one correct way to do stuff, there has never been room for evolution. (Insufficient entropy!) I'm going to compare it to JavaScript/TypeScript, because it's what I know best in 2024, and because it's an engaging contrast; yet the take-home message is also applicable to other languages, such as Rhombus (which looks cool!) Python feels timeless to me, like Roman majuscules. It was, in its day, brilliant: cleaner than Java, saner than Perl, and just so, so hackable. The strong Pythonic cultural rejection of Perl's 'more than one way to do it' dictum was powerfully clarificatory; we didn't have StackOverflow, and the _good_ technical resources were still all in physical books, so being able to learn one pretty-good way of expressing a concept or pattern was magical. But, like roman majusucles, Python didn't evolve, because it didn't have to. The marginal cost of change threatened the original value proposition, so it just didn't really ever happen. By contrast, while e.g. JavaScript had to evolve, because it was gobsmackingly bad, the necessity of that evolution has made made JavaScript (as a community and language) open to variation, change, competing paradigms, and imports from academe and research. Evolution loves a mess. TypeScript, for example, happened nearly overnight, and as a result of it and other innovations, I can spend my day working blissfully in algebraic types, doing frigging set theory to do precise type hinting, and passing around pure functions and immutable structures. My code runs everywhere, and my coding style is always changing (improving!), and the only real price I've had to pay is learning some regrettable nonsense about an extra '=' in my comparison operators, and maybe the idiocy of having both `undefined` and `null` types. Whereas, when I peep the pythonista channels at my work, I notice they are still having essentially the same conversation about eliminating the GIL that I remember them having in 2007 (yes I am old.) Which is not to say that Python is _bad_, per se; there are obvious advantages to having an imperfect but opinionated lingua franca, and I'd sure rather be thrown into an unfamiliar Python codebase from 10 years ago than an unfamiliar JavaScript codebase of an equivalent age. Yet I'll warrant that Python's long summer of success, combined with its one-way-to-do-it culture, close the mind and the imagination, and will eventually make it less fit-for-purpose than its competition. It will remain in use, and it will even find new contexts (machine learning, say) but 'the code part of the codebase' will be done in other languages. I suspect Python will, thanks to its exceptional readability and regularity, become a configuration language --- a part of the UI, essentially, a sort of shell. It will also continue to be a language used to teach programming. Hanging on here and there, sort of like how Latin hangs around in biology and medicine. But legacy Python codebases, thanks to that very readability, will probably be rewritten sooner rather than later. Standards (Latin, Python) are _useful_, and _timeless_ standards are some of the most valuable artifacts humans have ever produced. But it's the Innovator's Dilemma for sure.
- smokel 2y ago
  Hm, I don't think the "one way of doing things" koan holds up in practice, other than being a nice narrative. Nearly all other languages strive for doing things in one way, it is not something that makes Python unique. In fact, Python typically offers a complete mess of ways in which to solve something. Classes are sometimes good, sometimes they're not. Lists or Numpy arrays or Torch tensors, the choice depends mostly on performance, not on style. And Python is evolving. There is optional type checking for instance.
  - mkesper 2y ago
    The 'one way of doing things' mantra must be seen against the crazy ways of Perl (and later Ruby).
    - 1attice 2y ago
      Just so. Code written in Python has always had the virtue of being _incredibly boring_, which is a virtue that, at the time of its inception, was criminally undervalued; this was, after all, the heyday of C++, and if you weren't bringing operator overloading and multiple inheritance and generics to the table, the hipsters sniffed. For example, no one complained that Python had multiple inheritance; instead, we thought this was _a point in its favour_, over and against Java. (I imagine Guido added it grudgingly as a vox-populi.) Thus, the Pythonic mindset emerged as a sort of 'refusal of the call', sort of like Indiana Jones shooting the sword guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo). You could be against the hermetic complexity of Perl, but do it better than Java! Neat! These days, however, I suspect that Python, while still boring, is boring in the _wrong_ way, leaving opportunities for concision, clarity and performance on the table -- now-basic stuff like immutable datatypes, monads, tail recursion, concatenative programming, and so on. Python is the hobbit that stayed in Hobbiton.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  I can't tell what you mean concretely, because the two examples you give -- gradual typing and lack of concurrently executing threads -- are common to both languages. Python has support for gradual typing, and JavaScript is single-threaded (which is an even stronger property than having a GIL).
fire_lake 2y ago
I totally agree but always find myself in a very small minority when expressing this. People love Python and I don’t understand it. For me the issue is that one cannot write in a “light functional programming” style in Python. The language lacks many simple things, but chief of them is multi-line lambdas! In 2024 I’m very surprised that people aren’t clamouring for this.
- BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
  Ignoring the social benefits (which is easily the biggest draw of the language), Python feels really optimal for quick, simple tasks. The language lends itself to not overthinking it and building simple solutions.

vintermann 2y ago

Macros, ease of making internal DSLs a la Haskell?

baq 2y ago

macros.

ashton314 2y ago

Best-in-class macros! Rhombus makes metaprogramming safe and fun. Rhombus uses RRB trees for its native list structure: immutable data type with O(log32(n)) random access and functional update. Really amazing data structure. Also, the Rhombus compiler isn’t the quickest right now (still in development) but once compiled, it’s generally much faster than Python. (Though that’s not hard.)