Why the square brackets in particular? Notation is such an annoying part of this stuff, I’m actually leaning towards pushing a lot of structure to the filesystem
Definitely cool in concept, but very performance-intensive and slow.
This looks like a really neat project/idea; seeing the road map is exciting too, nearly everything I'd want.
I don't love the brackets syntax, or the [op val1 val2] ([* x x]) style, but I appreciate the attempt at clarity and consistency and none of these things are dealbreakers.
I do wonder why they've leaned so hard into talking about the type system being out of sight. Again, not a dealbreaker, but I feel strongly that explicit typing has a place in codebases beyond "describe something because you have to".
Strongly typed languages strike me as providing detailed hints throughout the codebase about what "shape" I need my data in or what shape of data I'm dealing with (without needing to lean on an LSP). I find it makes things very readable, almost self-documenting when done right.
From their docs about their choices: "The reasoning is simple: types exist to help the compiler catch your mistakes. They do not exist to help you express intent, at least not primarily." This strikes me as unnecessarily pedantic; as someone reading more code than I write (even my own), seeing a type distinctly—particular as part of a function signature—helps me understand (or add strong context) to the original author's goal before I even get to reading the implementation.
I find this doubly so when working through monadic types where I may get a typed error, a value, and have it all wrapped in an async promise of some kind (or perhaps an effect or two).
By the same token many languages allow you to leave out type annotations where they may be simple or clearly implied (and/or inferred by the compiler), so again, I'm not understanding the PoV (or need) for these claims. Perhaps Loon simply does it better? Am I missing something? Can I write return types to stub functions?
From the above blog post: "That's how good type inference feels! You write code. The types are just there. Because the language can see where it's going." Again, it feels strongly geared towards a world where we value writing code over reading/maintaining/understanding code, but maybe that's just my own bias/limitations.
Will follow it closely.
Types exist so that the compiler can reason about your code better - but not incidentally, they also help you reason about your code better!
To wit: even when working in dynamic languages, it's often considered a good practice to write down in docstrings the types of objects a function can operate on, even without static enforcement. Thinking about types is helpful for humans, too.
And it's not even just a thing to help you read code in the future - types help me write code, because as I sit down to write a function I know the possible values and states and capabilities of the object I'm working with. In the best of cases I can analytically handle all the possible cases of the object, almost automatically - the code flows out of the structure of the type.
> You never annotate a function signature unless you want to for documentation purposes.
so it sounds like function annotation is still an option for the purposes of communication, just no longer required in all cases.
[type Shape
[Circle f64]
[Rect f64 f64]
Point
]
[sig test_sig : Shape -> Float]
[fn test_sig [shape]
[match shape
[Circle r] [* 3.14159 [* r r]]
[Rect w h] [* w h]
Point 0.0
]
]
I agree that seeing types is helpful, though typing them is also not necessary. Perhaps the solution is an IDE that shows you all the types inferred by the compiler or maybe a linter that adds comments with types on file save.
That being said I took a look at the roadmap and the next major release is the one that focuses on Effects, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun a tad. Maybe I'll whip this out for AoC this year!
Oh dear, why? Abrasive aesthetics aside, this is bad for people with certain non-English keyboard layouts. Not me, but many do exist.
How much of this is actually real?
phpnode•2h ago
KPGv2•1h ago
x : Nat x = 5
You just say x = 5
I personally don't like that you don't seem to be able to manually describe the type for a fn/var, because it's very useful when prototyping to write stubs where you provide the typedef but then the actual variable/function is just marked as "todo"