5 ms·

If the syntax is not important, that would mean coding in whitespace or malboge would be as easy as coding in python

by poulpy123 1y ago

jibal 1y ago
[flagged]
- jeltz 1y ago
  Then make your arguments instead of making us try to read your mind. Why is Pony special?
  - arethuza 1y ago
    See: https://www.ponylang.io/discover/why-pony/ https://www.ponylang.io/discover/why-pony/ I don't think that Pony is claiming to be novel in the area of syntax?
    - pseudocomposer 1y ago
      If “reference capabilities” are the important thing about Pony, they should have a max 100-200 LoC example on the front page that uses them. As far as I can tell reading here, “reference capabilities” don’t do anything that properly-used C semaphores haven’t done for near half a century. Or that their abstraction of that isn’t nicer to use than, say, Elixir’s, or better than Rust’s borrow checker for managing mutability. A code example could convince me otherwise. Show us code that uses “reference capabilities” to do something. This “the syntax doesn’t matter” talk just comes off as bullshit to devs wanting to actually use a language. It would be better to commit to a syntax, post some damn examples on the site, and let devs get used to “reference capabilities.” If the syntax needs revising, just do that in Pony v2. If you want devs to be enthusiastic about your language, make it easy for them to understand why they should be enthusiastic. That means code, front and center, first thing.
      - dismalaf 1y ago
        A high performance Actor-based language is fairly unique. Pony is also very fast for a garbage collected language. Also the syntax is great, probably my favourite language ever syntactically. Dunno why there's a pointless argument about it in these comments... The reference capabilities are fairly novel as well. Apart from the lack of tooling, writing in Pony is great.
        pphysch 1y ago
        If the syntax is great (I agree it doesn't seem bad at first glance) then the website attempting to sell the language should quickly demonstrate that syntax and capabilities. This is what the argument was about. "Can we see the syntax without clicking a dozen links?" "No, the syntax is not important."
        dismalaf 1y ago
        Or 3rd option, the syntax is great but the creators are poor website designers because they came from the finance industry writing high performance back end systems...
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Good faith argumentation, or really argumentation in general, went out the window when you started treating whether syntax matters (for this language and in general) as a universal truth / (binary) logical statement rather than just an opinion.
  - mindcandy 1y ago
    One of the greatest problems in argumentation over the internet is that people gravitate towards acting as if every statement is intended to define a universal truth so they can argue against that strawman.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      I don't think (or rather, want to think) that people are being intentionally malicious. Instead, I think this is a scaling issue. Natural language being scaled in ways it isn't prepared to (e.g. over the internet to random strangers from all walks of life with very different intentions). I've been looking for platforms where one can maybe more formally encode their thoughts, so that the argumentation and debating skill barrier is lowered / eliminated, along with manipulation. And I did find some, but they don't quite hit the spot, and even if they did, people aren't really on them, so it doesn't matter sadly.
    - jibal 1y ago
      Indeed; thank you. That's certainly what happened here, together with ad hominem whataboutism. P.S. "please do flag and downvote rather." I don't have that capability, else I would certainly use it. "Surely you can appreciate that their comment was not written in agreement with or support for you" No, I disagree; I think that is exactly what it was--the subject of the comment was your comment, not mine--you wrote of my statement as being a universal truth, not v.v. Unsurprisingly, on every point where you and I disagree, I think that I am right and you are wrong. I think it is best that, from now on, neither of us speak to or about each other.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- Twirrim 1y ago
  You're talking from a position I don't think many would agree with, at all, and I think the responses you're getting are reflecting that. Syntax is probably one of the single most important things in any language. It matters for writing, but especially for reading. Bad syntax leads to all kinds of implementation mistakes. It comes with footguns primed ready to go off, probably at the worst possible time. Bad syntax can also make it hard to re-read code and understand what it's doing (especially if the language leans heavily on "magic"), leading to difficulties when troubleshooting, or difficulties when extending existing code. The more developers you have involved in any project, the more important good syntax becomes, because you all have to be able to read and understand each other's code, and know precisely what is happening. A lot of the bugs that end up in production tend to stem from some disconnect in understanding of the interactions between sections of code.
  - Tainnor 1y ago
    > Syntax is probably one of the single most important things in any language. It matters for writing, but especially for reading. That appears to be your position (and maybe even that of a majority of developers), but it apparently isn't the position of the Pony developers. If you have a language in which you can mathematically reason about code (which Pony claims very prominently), then surface concerns such as syntax seem to matter less. It's a different design goal and it feels like many people in the comments here don't appreciate that.
    - yuppiemephisto 1y ago
      Lean 4 truly lets you mathematically reason about code and has metaprogramming that truly makes syntax a surface thing, but if anything people who know this have the taste to want better syntax
  - jibal 1y ago
    "I don't think many would agree with" Aside from this being argumentum ad populum, my upvotes and some of the other comments say otherwise. And I find comments like yours full of strawmen and taking things out of context, to the point where it's simply not worthwhile to debate the substantive points.
fouric 1y ago
The GP is factually wrong. There's plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that language influences thought, and that syntax is therefore important. Although, I would point out that while your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable (the fact that syntax can make the difference between a very good language and an unusable one), whitespace and malbolge also have terrible semantics that contribute to them being unusable. As a former Lisp enthusiast (and still an enjoyer), I'd actually use my own darling as an example: Lisps have amazing semantics and are generally good languages. Their syntax is highly regular and structured and easy to parse...except that it's brain-hostile, and I'm convinced that it actively makes it harder to read and write - not just adopt, but actually use.
- Tainnor 1y ago
  > There's plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that language influences thought, and that syntax is therefore important. Are you talking about natural languages here? The so called Sapir Whorf thesis - in its strong or weak form - is rather controversial. There are some interesting findings, but the interpretation of them is still hotly debated. In any case, none of the studies that I've seen (e.g. about colour perception, spatial reasoning, etc.) seem to be about syntax. I'd have to see some evidence that head-marking language speaker somehow think differently than dependent-marking language speakers and I haven't seen that. > your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable it's a valid argument when somebody is speaking in absolutes, but I haven't seen GGP do that. There's a difference between saying "all syntax is completely arbitrary" and "syntax is not the point" - the latter suggests to me that if you stay within certain reasonable bounds (e.g. not be whitespace or malbolge), whether you use significant whitespace of braces, the language looks more like Pascal or like C, etc. are of minor importance in the grand scheme of things. Which is something you may disagree with, but it's a much more reasonable point that anything you can just counter with "but whitspace!".
  - jibal 1y ago
    Thank you for the refreshingly honest and accurate comment.
- jibal 1y ago

If the syntax is not important, that would mean coding in whitespace or malboge would be as easy as coding in python

jibal 1y ago

[flagged]

jeltz 1y ago
Then make your arguments instead of making us try to read your mind. Why is Pony special?
- arethuza 1y ago
  See: https://www.ponylang.io/discover/why-pony/ https://www.ponylang.io/discover/why-pony/ I don't think that Pony is claiming to be novel in the area of syntax?
  - pseudocomposer 1y ago
    If “reference capabilities” are the important thing about Pony, they should have a max 100-200 LoC example on the front page that uses them. As far as I can tell reading here, “reference capabilities” don’t do anything that properly-used C semaphores haven’t done for near half a century. Or that their abstraction of that isn’t nicer to use than, say, Elixir’s, or better than Rust’s borrow checker for managing mutability. A code example could convince me otherwise. Show us code that uses “reference capabilities” to do something. This “the syntax doesn’t matter” talk just comes off as bullshit to devs wanting to actually use a language. It would be better to commit to a syntax, post some damn examples on the site, and let devs get used to “reference capabilities.” If the syntax needs revising, just do that in Pony v2. If you want devs to be enthusiastic about your language, make it easy for them to understand why they should be enthusiastic. That means code, front and center, first thing.
    - dismalaf 1y ago
      A high performance Actor-based language is fairly unique. Pony is also very fast for a garbage collected language. Also the syntax is great, probably my favourite language ever syntactically. Dunno why there's a pointless argument about it in these comments... The reference capabilities are fairly novel as well. Apart from the lack of tooling, writing in Pony is great.
      - pphysch 1y ago
        If the syntax is great (I agree it doesn't seem bad at first glance) then the website attempting to sell the language should quickly demonstrate that syntax and capabilities. This is what the argument was about. "Can we see the syntax without clicking a dozen links?" "No, the syntax is not important."
        dismalaf 1y ago
        Or 3rd option, the syntax is great but the creators are poor website designers because they came from the finance industry writing high performance back end systems...
perching_aix 1y ago
Good faith argumentation, or really argumentation in general, went out the window when you started treating whether syntax matters (for this language and in general) as a universal truth / (binary) logical statement rather than just an opinion.
- mindcandy 1y ago
  One of the greatest problems in argumentation over the internet is that people gravitate towards acting as if every statement is intended to define a universal truth so they can argue against that strawman.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    I don't think (or rather, want to think) that people are being intentionally malicious. Instead, I think this is a scaling issue. Natural language being scaled in ways it isn't prepared to (e.g. over the internet to random strangers from all walks of life with very different intentions). I've been looking for platforms where one can maybe more formally encode their thoughts, so that the argumentation and debating skill barrier is lowered / eliminated, along with manipulation. And I did find some, but they don't quite hit the spot, and even if they did, people aren't really on them, so it doesn't matter sadly.
  - jibal 1y ago
    Indeed; thank you. That's certainly what happened here, together with ad hominem whataboutism. P.S. "please do flag and downvote rather." I don't have that capability, else I would certainly use it. "Surely you can appreciate that their comment was not written in agreement with or support for you" No, I disagree; I think that is exactly what it was--the subject of the comment was your comment, not mine--you wrote of my statement as being a universal truth, not v.v. Unsurprisingly, on every point where you and I disagree, I think that I am right and you are wrong. I think it is best that, from now on, neither of us speak to or about each other.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
Twirrim 1y ago
You're talking from a position I don't think many would agree with, at all, and I think the responses you're getting are reflecting that. Syntax is probably one of the single most important things in any language. It matters for writing, but especially for reading. Bad syntax leads to all kinds of implementation mistakes. It comes with footguns primed ready to go off, probably at the worst possible time. Bad syntax can also make it hard to re-read code and understand what it's doing (especially if the language leans heavily on "magic"), leading to difficulties when troubleshooting, or difficulties when extending existing code. The more developers you have involved in any project, the more important good syntax becomes, because you all have to be able to read and understand each other's code, and know precisely what is happening. A lot of the bugs that end up in production tend to stem from some disconnect in understanding of the interactions between sections of code.
- Tainnor 1y ago
  > Syntax is probably one of the single most important things in any language. It matters for writing, but especially for reading. That appears to be your position (and maybe even that of a majority of developers), but it apparently isn't the position of the Pony developers. If you have a language in which you can mathematically reason about code (which Pony claims very prominently), then surface concerns such as syntax seem to matter less. It's a different design goal and it feels like many people in the comments here don't appreciate that.
  - yuppiemephisto 1y ago
    Lean 4 truly lets you mathematically reason about code and has metaprogramming that truly makes syntax a surface thing, but if anything people who know this have the taste to want better syntax
- jibal 1y ago
  "I don't think many would agree with" Aside from this being argumentum ad populum, my upvotes and some of the other comments say otherwise. And I find comments like yours full of strawmen and taking things out of context, to the point where it's simply not worthwhile to debate the substantive points.

fouric 1y ago

The GP is factually wrong. There's plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that language influences thought, and that syntax is therefore important. Although, I would point out that while your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable (the fact that syntax can make the difference between a very good language and an unusable one), whitespace and malbolge also have terrible semantics that contribute to them being unusable. As a former Lisp enthusiast (and still an enjoyer), I'd actually use my own darling as an example: Lisps have amazing semantics and are generally good languages. Their syntax is highly regular and structured and easy to parse...except that it's brain-hostile, and I'm convinced that it actively makes it harder to read and write - not just adopt, but actually use.

Tainnor 1y ago
> There's plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that language influences thought, and that syntax is therefore important. Are you talking about natural languages here? The so called Sapir Whorf thesis - in its strong or weak form - is rather controversial. There are some interesting findings, but the interpretation of them is still hotly debated. In any case, none of the studies that I've seen (e.g. about colour perception, spatial reasoning, etc.) seem to be about syntax. I'd have to see some evidence that head-marking language speaker somehow think differently than dependent-marking language speakers and I haven't seen that. > your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable it's a valid argument when somebody is speaking in absolutes, but I haven't seen GGP do that. There's a difference between saying "all syntax is completely arbitrary" and "syntax is not the point" - the latter suggests to me that if you stay within certain reasonable bounds (e.g. not be whitespace or malbolge), whether you use significant whitespace of braces, the language looks more like Pascal or like C, etc. are of minor importance in the grand scheme of things. Which is something you may disagree with, but it's a much more reasonable point that anything you can just counter with "but whitspace!".
- jibal 1y ago
  Thank you for the refreshingly honest and accurate comment.
jibal 1y ago