Posted by surprisetalk 1 day ago
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.
[fn square [x] [* x x]]
fn square(x) = x * x;
Also
> Hindley-Milner inference eliminates type annotations.
I think it's pretty widely agreed at this point that global type inference is a bad idea. The downsides outweigh the upsides. Specifically: much worse errors & much less readable code.
I do. The advantage being that if you suddenly realize that you want to do super-duper-multiplication instead of regular multiplication, you can just change the name instead of having to rewrite the entire expression. And honestly, having a few random functions be called differently from others feels gross.
Lisp and similar are just "hey it's really easy to write a parser if we just make all programmers write the AST directly!". Cool if the goal of your language is a really simple parser. Not so cool if you want to make it pleasant to read for humans.
That's my impression, at least. Like I said, I've never actually used a Lisp. Maybe I'm put off by the smug superiority of so many Lisp people who presume that using Lisp makes them better at programming, smarter, and probably morally superior to me.