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| ▲ | zem 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | the way i like to put it is that the syntax is the user interface of the language. if your user interface sucks, your product will not be pleasant to use, no matter how capable it is. | |
| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | For Pony in particular, the syntax is not important ... it's simply not the point of the language. | | |
| ▲ | poulpy123 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If the syntax is not important, that would mean coding in whitespace or malboge would be as easy as coding in python | | |
| ▲ | fouric 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > 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!". |
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| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | Twirrim 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | "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. |
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| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you truly feel that way, please do flag and downvote rather. Surely you can appreciate that their comment was not written in agreement with or in support of you, and that hijacking their thoughts to sarcastically taunt me really doesn't serve you, your point, or this community. At least I certainly struggle to find what's good faith about this comment of yours specifically. Edit: > No, I disagree; Sure, costs me nothing to take your word for it, so it shall be that way then. Definitely came across like that to me though, so if that was not intentional, maybe it's something for your later consideration. |
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| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | dang 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I appreciate your good intentions re the site guidelines! But I'm afraid you've been breaking them multiple times in this thread by being much too aggressive with other users. This post is one example, and here are two others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722043 It's laudable to want work like Pony to get discussed in terms of the most interesting things about it, but the best way to do this is to describe and explain more of what's interesting. It's not helpful to comment about how bad other comments are, and certainly not to cross into attack. Those things feed flamewars, as unfortunately happened badly in this thread. That's what we're most trying to avoid. | | |
| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent [-] | | All I see is that I've been personally attacked and mischaracterized. If I could downvote such comments I would do that rather than respond. Calling my response here aggressive or an attack is simply not factual, it is hypervigilance against me. Where is your criticism of "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." ?? I can't flag that outrageous personal attack and no one else has. As for Pony, I'm not here to defend it or explain it ... I simply responded to casual dismissals of it on trivial grounds. P.S. A personal attack is a personal attack ... it's not the target's fault for perceiving it that way. If you're saying something negative about someone then that's a personal attack. Just talk about the subject and the substance, not people. For example, do not write things like "You seem to be struggling with the whole fallacy thing by the way". And FWIW, I think I have a very good grasp of fallacies ... e.g., I know that "no true Scotsman would put sugar on his porridge" is a No True Scotsman fallacy but "certain Scotsmen put sugar on their porridge" is not. "Why wouldn't you be able to flag it?" Ask dang ... as I said, I do not have that capability. | | |
| ▲ | Twirrim 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > All I see is that I've been personally attacked and mischaracterized. I think there is a fundamental gap in communication. Your actual point is not coming across at all, anywhere in this thread. That's why you're getting downvoted. "For Pony in particular, the syntax is not important ... it's simply not the point of the language." You said that in direct response to someone who was wanting to see the syntax.
While I do appreciate that it's not strictly speaking necessary in the context of your reply, it doesn't communicate at all why syntax isn't important to the pony language. You're just making a definitive statement unsupported by anything. Context or even a brief explanation would have been extremely helpful and almost certainly avoided all of this fuss. Your response, given without any context as to why syntax isn't important for pony, was actually harmful, rather than useful. | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I really did not mean it as a personal attack, as unbelievable as that may be, apologies if it came across that way. > I can't flag that outrageous personal attack and no one else has. Why wouldn't you be able to flag it? And there's no flagged counter, it's not possible for ordinary users to tell how many times a post has been flagged; you cannot know that no one has flagged it, only that it is yet to reach the threshold. > it's not the target's fault for perceiving it that way. Where did I say or suggest that it was? If I thought that, what would I be apologizing for? > If you're saying something negative about someone then that's a personal attack. I disagree: if someone has negative traits or behavioral patterns that are externally observable, people should not be at fault for observing them and confronting the person about it. In my view, and I believe in most everyone's view, personal attacks (personal insults) are attacks (expressions that incite) that use the other party's real, perceived, or claimed-perceived personal attributes as but a delivery vehicle for insult. They're the exact opposite of a genuine critique of someone's character or behavior in this sense, which is a thing I recognize as existing, valid, and distinct from this. And so when I said I didn't mean those to be personal attacks, that's why I did so; it was me clarifying that I wasn't abusing personal critique to deliver an insult (nor do I think I actually delivered any), I legitimately just meant to offer a critique. Clearly it didn't land that way, and so for that I apologize. This is in contrast with "You seem to be struggling with the whole fallacy thing by the way", which I 100% meant as a personal insult, and was unsurprisingly moderated out for it. I did mean it, I do agree with it, but it was absolutely a vehicle for delivering an insult first, and everything else second. It really does seem like we just disagree every step of the way. |
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| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
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| ▲ | jeltz 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then make your arguments instead of making us try to read your mind. Why is Pony special? | | |
| ▲ | arethuza 4 days ago | parent [-] | | See: https://www.ponylang.io/discover/why-pony/ I don't think that Pony is claiming to be novel in the area of syntax? | | |
| ▲ | pseudocomposer 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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... |
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| ▲ | SiempreViernes 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Having looked at some source examples, I'm pretty sure Pony has syntax errors just like every other parsed language. | | |
| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent [-] | | We must not be communicating clearly, because that doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with what I wrote. I thought it was clear that the discussion was about the syntactic specifics of programming languages. I certainly wasn't claiming that Pony doesn't have a syntax, or that it's not important to use the correct syntax to write a Pony program. | | |
| ▲ | gosub100 4 days ago | parent [-] | | People like to make themselves sound smart and important by finding the most trivial and low effort ways to discount and invalidate your point, instead of expending effort to respond to a more substantial argument that I could easily read from what you wrote. It's just the nature of online forums I think. It's easy (but incorrect) to conclude this place is full of jerks, because sometimes jerks are more likely to respond at all, and you don't get a baseline of how many people read your message but didn't reply at all. | | |
| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, thank you. I found the amount of bad faith in the responses is really rather shocking, but you have a good point about self-selection. | | |
| ▲ | gosub100 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I even regret using the word "jerks". Even better would be that people get entranced in a tactical mindset of "how do I most efficiently dismantle and invalidate this input?" Which certainly sounds like a jerk, but in reality they aren't even "considering the human" (can't remember which website used that in their guidelines, maybe early reddit?) in the first place. That's all just my pet theory and speculation. | |
| ▲ | Tainnor 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I honestly think there's a certain number of people whose insecurities get triggered when they encounter something that they don't immediately understand and instead of concluding that it's not for them or that they lack prerequisite knowledge, they get angry and dismissive. |
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| ▲ | quotemstr 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | dang 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is textbook no true scotsman fallacy, you're aware, right? | | |
| ▲ | BobaFloutist 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's really more of an inversion. No true Scotsman is
"No Scotsman would ever (commit murder)"
"What about (Scotsman that committed murder)?"
"Ok, no true Scotsman would commit murder" Whereas this follows the form more of
"Murder is bad"
"I dunno, a lot of Scotsmen commit murder"
"Ok, but no true Scotsman would commit murder" It's the same (annoying) assertion, but the fundamental argument is about the value of murder, not the category of "Scotsmen," so it's not the same extremely obvious fallacy of redefining the literal topic at hand whenever a counterexample is presented. | | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent [-] | | It's no true scotsman if you just resolve their indirection: no true scotsman would care about syntax, because a true scotsman is someone who doesn't care for such a thing - otherwise, they're people who GP finds to be of low value, and thus their opinion doesn't count, as they're no true scotsman, not true programmers. It's why I called it an outright textbook example: it's an appeal to purity, where purity is determined in a circular way - the very definition of the no true scotsman fallacy, as far as I could find and understand it. |
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| ▲ | fkyoureadthedoc 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | And? Doesn't mean it's not true. It just means you can't use it to win an argument against a nerd. | | |
| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If it's a fallacy then it's nonsensical to call it true. But in fact that comment was not at all a True Scotsman Fallacy, or any other kind of fallacy. Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is vastly different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Doesn't mean it's not true. True, it just means that it's idiotic, rather. | | |
| ▲ | fkyoureadthedoc 4 days ago | parent [-] | | oof I'm pretty sure that's a fallacy, let me just consult the manual here... | | |
| ▲ | jibal 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Speaking of fallacies, it's complete nonsense (not the only example of it from that source) to say that the comment in question was a True Scotsman Fallacy (or any other kind of fallacy). Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is very different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. | | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Right, saying that only programmers who don't solve genuine problems and instead merely follow trends and treat it as fashion (and are thus no true scotsman) care about syntax, implying their opinion doesn't count, is definitely not a no true scotsman fallacy. It totally doesn't suggest that true scotsman heed the notion that syntax doesn't matter, and that so by definition, anyone else is just some goober following the cargo cult, so they don't count. [0] /s And so no, > Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is very different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. I categorically disagree that these would be meaningfully distinct claims, as the "[only] a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge" bit specifically invokes the implicit disqualification of said Scotsman from being counted as a True Scotsman. > not the only example of it from that source Pretty ironic of you to say that. [0] the literal definition of the no true scotsman fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman | | |
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| ▲ | perching_aix 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Keep us updated. |
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| ▲ | poulpy123 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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