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This is really awesome, and at its core a powerful concept. After checking the diva out, a thought occurred to me: any new language revision should come with an
by possibilistic 12y ago
This is really awesome, and at its core a powerful concept. After checking the diva out, a thought occurred to me: any new language revision should come with an officially supported tool from the authors to translate changes backwards.
Counter to the logic of tools like Python's 2to3, I think the more important need is to start writing new code, not porting old code. If you can run new code on the old runtime / interpreter / whatever, you get all the good feels. Porting sucks. New features rock. It just seems like a far superior experience for everyone involved. If happiness is how infomemes spread, assuaging the porting woes couldn't hurt.
I realize there could be concerns involving performance, changes to semantics, etc. that may make back-transliterated (transpiled?) code inherently worse. But if language designers took design of a backwards compiler into consideration when writing the new grammar and semantics, we might see smaller changes brought about in an overall faster pace of iteration.
Just a thought.
This tool is neat. :)
- CJefferson 12y agoI agree entirely. One of the biggest mistakes (for me) that Python made was releasing 2to3 but not a 3to2. This meant if you wanted to keep a python2 and python3 compatable codebase, the obvious thing to do what to keep it in python2.