Re: A proposal for the confusing pseudo table ≈ array concept

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

  Attempt #2.  I'll be optimistic and hope you can see the connections that
I'm seeing here.  I'm trying to avoid being "wholly negative."

  Earlier in this thread you said:

> Do we need to mollycoddle Lua newcomers? Coders can't handle complexity?
> They are coders?

  And in January of 2017 you said:

> Agree, and I can't think of anything really bad as far as modern syntax
> highlighting is concerned, and styling can always be adjusted to meet
> personal needs. I don't hear of folks complaining about highlighting in
> Visual Studio either. So why are some folks not using it? Anyone else who
> prefer monochrome text who wants to speak up? :-)

  I spoke up (recap:  I don't care for syntax highlighting) and while I did
say that you are NOT a bad programmer if you do, in my mind, I do find it
very much a crutch and I tend to feel they mollycoddles programmers.

  And yes, I've tried IDEs in the past.  About once a decade actually.  And
every time I do, I inenvitably find them useless as they puke spectacularly
on my code [1][2].  Because of that, I find them useless, and yes, I have a
slight bias against programmers who do use them.  Too long to go into here,
but basically, I'm a language maven, not a tool maven [5].

  The summary:  I think you are off base with your tone here (sorry for the
negativity).

It was thus said that the Great KHMan once stated:
> On 1/20/2018 1:17 AM, Elias Hogstvedt wrote:
> >I do have a bias towards newcomers and being interested in a 
> >language that is easy to learn (as Lua is what I tend to teach)
> >But I think this is mostly an ambiguity problem not a complexity 
> >problem. At least I would think in Lua, complexity should come 
> >from the software you write and not the language itself.
> 
> Morpheus: You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and 
> disbelief. Free your mind.
> 
> Cypher: Everybody falls the first time.
> 
> The phrase "an ambiguity problem" is wholly negative and sets the 
> issue up for failure. You have a problem, your mind is not free. 
> Your phrasing then transmits the concepts as 'problems' to those 
> you teach. Hence it goes something like this: "My instructor keeps 
> warning me about this thing, this ambiguity, so my word, he must 
> mean that this Lua has a bad feature that we must swallow, and by 
> golly, it will be tough to swallow..."
> 
> Coders should be able to break mental barriers. The table is part 
> of the bedrock of Lua. It's a lookup. NoSQL is a lookup. Google is 
> a lookup. Plenty of folks come around and say, it should be done 
> this way, it should be done that way. Perhaps they have notions of 
> how things should be done and wants to impose their mental 
> limitations on this new thing they are learning.

  I too, get tired of programmers that want to extend Lua to be more like
<language du jour---especially hate it if it's an object oriented language>
but your tone here is galling---you can explicitly calling out Elias as
close minded because he wants an array type.

  The Lua sequence *is* one of the most contentious parts of Lua and while
I've never been bothered with the concept (as a concept or even in the code
I've written) it does have implications---namely that the length of a
sequence in Lua is NOT O(1) but O(log n), which may be an issue in some
cases (thankfully so far, not in the code I've written which has been
deployed).  

> Let's see. In the 1960s, Fortran and COBOL would be the two 
> greatest computer languages in the whole wide world, the amazing, 
> awesome 21st century future made live. Where does Fortran and 
> COBOL stand now? Where would we be 50 years from now?

  You forgot Lisp, in who's community epitomizes the "let the newbies sink"
line of thought.

> We must be able to break these mental barriers to move forward. 

  So, the thought that "Lua should have this feature" is a mental barrier to
moving forward?  Or only those features you don't like?

> Must all computer languages have separate types for arrays and 
> hashes? 

  Some more questions along these lines (and were I was coming from in my
previous message):

	Must all computer languages have types?

	Must all computer languages be structured?

	Must all computer languages be deterministic?

  By the way, there *is* a computer language I am aware of that has all
these traits.  It's a very interesting language, and as far as I can tell,
*has* been used for three commerical offerings (only two of which are
programs!).  The approach I took in my previous email was that types are not
bad.  You apparently feel differently.

> Is it an inviolable design requirement that some coders 
> expect? Free your mind. :-)

  I ask the same of you.  
  
  -spc

[1]	I recall trying to use a Java based IDE back in 1997 or 1998.  It
	was at the very least the first (or one of the first) IDEs specific
	to Java, and it couldn't even load my code (written using a text
	editor written in 1981!).

	Back then, Java was being positioned to run Java "applets" in the
	browser, and it came with its own windowing system called AWT.  AWT
	came with some pre-canned layout managers, but none of them fit with
	the applet I was writing.  So I wrote my own layout manager.  It
	wasn't hard.

	But apparantly, the writers of that particular IDE never thought
	anyone in their right mind, would write their own layout manager. 
	And because of that, the IDE crashed spectacularly on me.  I went
	back to using the editor from 1981, which could handle the code
	without issue.

[2]	The last one I tried was just a year or two ago.  It might have been
	eclipse.  Or the other popular one I'm blanking on (start with an
	I?).  Anyway, I decided to give it a try.  I couldn't even load a
	*one file C program* without it crashing.  A *one file C program*!

	It wasn't even worth my time to report the problem because it was a
	C/C++ based IDE, and while my code was (and still is) valid C, it's
	not valid C++ and I know the maintainers couldn't fix it because a)
	it would be too involved [3] and b) I shouldn't be writing code in C
	anyway [4].

[3]	I had a structure with a field name of "class".  That's a valid ID
	in C.  It would take a herculean effort to fix the syntax
	highlighting.

[4]	The vibe I get on the Internet is that if you aren't working on the
	Linux kernel, you should be shot if you code in C.

	I probably hang out in anti-C sites too much.

[5]	http://blog.osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides