Not "never exploit"; Reason and BuckleScript are examples of different "language skins" for OCaml.

The problem with "skins" is that they create variety where people strive for uniformity to lower the cognitive load. OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that.

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brabel 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> OTOH transparent switching between skins (about as easy as changing the tab sizes) would alleviate that.

That's one of my hopes for the future of the industry: people will be able to just choose the code style and even syntax family (which you're calling skin) they prefer when editing code, and it will be saved in whatever is the "default" for the language (or even something like the Unison Language: store the AST directly which allows cool stuff like de-duplicating definitions and content-addressable code - an idea I first found out on the amazing talk by Joe Armstrong, "The mess we're in" [1]).

Rust, in particular, would perhaps benefit a lot given how a lot of people hate its syntax... but also Lua for people who just can't stand the Pascal-like syntax and really need their C-like braces to be happy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

	▲	nine_k 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also consider translation to non-English languages, including different writing and syntax systems (e.g. Arabic or Japanese). Some languages have tools for more or less straightforward skinning. Clojure to Tamil: https://github.com/echeran/clj-thamil/blob/master/src/clj_th... C++ to distorted Russian: https://sizeof.livejournal.com/23169.html

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cibyr 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

People fight about tab sizes all the time though.

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dbdr 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That's precisely the point of using tabs for indentation: you don't need to fight over it, because it's a local display preference that does not affect the source code at all, so everyone can just configure whatever they prefer locally without affecting other people.

The idea of "skins" is apparently to push that even further by abstracting the concrete syntax.

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lucketone 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> you don't need to fight over it, because it's a local display preference

This has limits.

Files produced with tab=2 and others with tab=8, might have quite different result regarding nesting.

(pain is still on the menu)

	▲	philsnow 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do you mean that files produced with "wide" tabs might have hard newlines embedded more readily in longer lines? Or that maybe people writing with "narrow" tabs might be comfortable writing 6-deep if/else trees that wrap when somebody with their tabs set to wider opens the same file?