Re: Say No to global-by-default (summary of the discussion)

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

On 17/07/2018 22:37, Egor Skriptunoff wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Last time I proposed "$" prefix because some programming languages (Perl,
> bash, PHP) have variable names prefixed with "$".
> But it seems some people dislike any similarities with Perl :-)
> "$" was also criticized because it requires pressing SHIFT on a keyboard,
> and programmers are usually lazy (laziness is the first great virtue of a
> programmer, according to Larry Wall)
> Ok, let's stop talking about Perl  :-)
>
> This time I show another possible prefix: the backslash.
> Backslash is not used in Lua syntax (except inside quoted strings), so why
> not?

[snip]

> -- Egor

TL;DR

Sorry if my answer doesn't cover all the details you covered.

I don't agree and that's why. To me it all boils down to two annoying 
aspects of what Lua would become with your proposal:

1. I really don't like optional syntax just to avoid "spelling 
mistakes". One of the benefit of Lua vs. Java and C++ is its small 
"human-memory footprint": I don't have to remember lots of details just 
to understand code *written by others*.

I might not use the "backslash notation" in my code, so I could forget 
about it, then I find some nice snippets of code from other people and 
then it takes much longer to decode or to integrate in my code base (and 
I'm no longer a professional developer, I imagine the nightmare of 
integrating two pieces of code with same "semantics" but different 
apparent syntax).

2. Worse still: I hate sigils on var names. It's a sort of dumbed-down 
namespace functionality and to my "parser mind" is extremely distracting 
(that's the same with MS hungarian notation, but I grew used to that in 
my occasional incursions in Windows API).

I would rather like a more full-fledged namespace functionality that 
didn't occur run-time penalties (like table access does), but I'm not 
sure how this would impact the size of Lua (and its overall usefulness 
could be debatable).

Moreover, anytime I see a non-alphnum symbol my mind tends to interpret 
it as an operator. It's not a matter of laziness in writing, but again, 
it is distracting when *reading* (especially debugging code) and it 
slows me down.

I am used to prefixes a la LaTeX, but then my mind is switched to 
"markup language" mode, and anyway, I don't like LaTeX syntax too much 
On the other hand I understand that in a substantially declarative 
language where code is mainly plain text interspersed with 
formatting/structuring commands keywords with sigils make sense, because 
they help you locate markup more easily in a sea of text (and they are 
lighter than HTML/XML tags). But I'm digressing.

Bottom line: your proposal would make my Lua experience more painful
I chose Lua as my main language years ago over Python as it was 
lightweight and its syntax was clean and easy to remember, even If I had 
to cope with it's lack of officially endorsed standard libraries; yes 
lots of high-quality one-man efforts, but these tend to be abandoned on 
the long run, especially if they are "hobby-projects".

I ended-up rolling my own (yep, substandard and not really complete, but 
good for my own use cases, and I can find a bug in them in a breeze), 
sometimes adapting code from others. This latter part is important: my 
efforts would have been much greater in understanding other people's 
code if the syntax had been more complex.


my 2 EURocent;

Cheers!

-- Lorenzo