On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 12:36:17 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> I am not convinced. CoffeeScript as a JavaScript dialect hasn't really taken off, people just use JavaScript.

Well, I don't know, Dart is in the same vein as CoffeeScript. Dart is compiling to Javascript and Angular Dart is gaining quite a bit of interest even before being ready for production. AngularJS is already quite popular, and more messy than the Dart version. There is a clear upgrade path from JS->Dart. Dart VM will most likely be integrated in Chrome by the end of the year and that probably will have an effect on adoption rate. But, the Dart semantics are significantly better than ECMAScript/Javascript. Probably more so than CoffeeScript.

cfront also used to compile to C, but the C++ semantics are more suitable for OO than C. So it supports a different workflow. (but cfront as I remember it was nowhere near great)

So, in one aspect I agree, if the dialect is just syntax, then it has less chance of gaining momentum, but if it better supports a particular workflow/ type of modelling then it might succeed.

I think a python-like syntax in combination with an interpreter like environment (in the vain of ipython) could be more suitable for a particular workflow than the c-like syntax. A strongly typed, terse and readable language with a good dev environment could be a real killer.

Prototype in the REPL/interpreter and paste into your editor is an attractive development proposition.

On 3/22/14, 1:22 AM, Steve Teale wrote:
> On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 01:47:48 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
> wrote:
>> On 3/21/14, 5:18 PM, w0rp wrote:
>
>> A dozen people are doing the simple work and the complicated work,
>> while the rest of the forum sits on the sidelines wringing hands about
>> what to do about the future of D.
>>
>>
> Andrei,
>
> Is there a list of grunt jobs that need to be done?
>
> Steve

Maintaining a list would be as much overhead as fixing the items on it. Just pick from:

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pulls
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/tools/pulls
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer/pulls
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dconf.org/pulls
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/visuald/pulls
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pulls
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pulls
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pulls


Andrei

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 13:03:06 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> ALGOL60 did not have significant whitespace and an offside rule, just
> like C, C++ and D don't, whereas Python, OCaml, etc. do.

I've programmed in OCaml for many years and I somehow missed the significant whitespace.  Even the Revised syntax for OCaml (the improved and unused one) did not use significant whitespace, though I recall that there were unloved projects to provide such a syntax.

C++ has a much nastier syntax than D (IMO of course :-) but the SPECS proposal for a resyntaxed C++ never caught on. I liked some of the improvements suggested there, in particular the more Pascal-ish or Scala-ish declaration syntax, and would have liked something like that in D, but there are so many more issues to be fixed that daydreams of improved syntax seem frivolous to me.

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 01:22:14 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> ...Given D's compilation speed, that can be achieved as a dialect without much aggravation by using a preprocessor.
>
> In fact I considered writing such a preprocessor as a running example...

Please someone could show a little example of the quote above? I
mean it would act like C preprocessor or in D it has another
meaning?

Thanks,

Matheus.

Am 22.03.2014 17:14, schrieb Brian Rogoff:
> On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 13:03:06 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> ALGOL60 did not have significant whitespace and an offside rule, just
>> like C, C++ and D don't, whereas Python, OCaml, etc. do.
>
> I've programmed in OCaml for many years and I somehow missed the
> significant whitespace.  Even the Revised syntax for OCaml (the improved
> and unused one) did not use significant whitespace, though I recall that
> there were unloved projects to provide such a syntax.
>

When F# was still in beta, it had OCaml syntax as default with a significant whitespace mode that could be turned on with a compiler directive "#light on".

While asking the embryonic F# community which mode should be the default.

The significant whitespace mode won and became the default, with the
OCaml mode being the optional one.

--
Paulo

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 16:19:44 UTC, MattCoder wrote:
> Please someone could show a little example of the quote above? I
> mean it would act like C preprocessor or in D it has another
> meaning?

You would write a little program that sees changes of indentation and puts the braces in. So

foo
  bar
  baz
whatever

It would see that bar and baz are indented together and put {} around it, making:

foo
{ bar
  baz }
whatever

or something like that, which can then be fed into the D compiler normally.

On 3/22/14, 9:19 AM, MattCoder wrote:
> On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 01:22:14 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
> wrote:
>> ...Given D's compilation speed, that can be achieved as a dialect
>> without much aggravation by using a preprocessor.
>>
>> In fact I considered writing such a preprocessor as a running example...
>
> Please someone could show a little example of the quote above? I
> mean it would act like C preprocessor or in D it has another
> meaning?

As simple as it gets. The program would translate files with extension ".wsd" into files with extension ".d" and run dmd (or rdmd) transparently. Appropriate handling of file timestamps etc. would complete a nice utility. You'd use it like

wsd myscript.wsd

which under the hood would create (if necessary) myscript.d and then exec rdmd on it.


Andrei

On Sat, 2014-03-22 at 16:14 +0000, Brian Rogoff wrote:
> On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 13:03:06 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> > ALGOL60 did not have significant whitespace and an offside
> > rule, just
> > like C, C++ and D don't, whereas Python, OCaml, etc. do.
> 
> I've programmed in OCaml for many years and I somehow missed the significant whitespace.  Even the Revised syntax for OCaml (the improved and unused one) did not use significant whitespace, though I recall that there were unloved projects to provide such a syntax.

I appear to have typed OCaml when I meant Haskell, possibly because I am trying to build Unison. You are correct (obviously :-) OCaml does not use an offside rule approach. In his response, Paulo points out that F# does, I did not appreciate this, so that is definitely a WILT.

> C++ has a much nastier syntax than D (IMO of course :-) but the SPECS proposal for a resyntaxed C++ never caught on. I liked some of the improvements suggested there, in particular the more Pascal-ish or Scala-ish declaration syntax, and would have liked something like that in D, but there are so many more issues to be fixed that daydreams of improved syntax seem frivolous to me.

The Scala, Go, Rust, etc. use of "type after variable name" reads better for me, but C, C++, D, Java, Groovy, Ceylon are all "type before variable" (well the C++ rule is spiral out, but…), so I just get used to switching.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On 3/21/2014 7:08 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Perhaps we should be talking about how more people can make github
> contributions instead. ;-)

Anyone can create a bugzilla account and/or a github account and get started contributing. Nobody's permission is required.

On Sat, 2014-03-22 at 15:10 +0000, Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQi?=
@puremagic.com wrote:
[…]
> Well, I don't know, Dart is in the same vein as CoffeeScript. Dart is compiling to Javascript and Angular Dart is gaining quite a bit of interest even before being ready for production. AngularJS is already quite popular, and more messy than the Dart version. There is a clear upgrade path from JS->Dart. Dart VM will most likely be integrated in Chrome by the end of the year and that probably will have an effect on adoption rate. But, the Dart semantics are significantly better than ECMAScript/Javascript. Probably more so than CoffeeScript.
[…]

I am currently ambivalent about Dart. Node.js has shown that many people like "end to end" the same language. Many are asking about server-side Dart as well as client-side Dart in the browser.

Another player in this game is Ceylon which has the explicit aim of being the "end to end" language compiling to JVM or JavaScript for server side and JavaScript for client side. I'm not sure how they play the HTML5 (AngularJS, Ember.js, Backbone.js, jQuery, etc) game. But I have stopped following all that recently for various reasons.

> I think a python-like syntax in combination with an interpreter like environment (in the vain of ipython) could be more suitable for a particular workflow than the c-like syntax. A strongly typed, terse and readable language with a good dev environment could be a real killer.
> 
> Prototype in the REPL/interpreter and paste into your editor is an attractive development proposition.

IPython is an excellent tool for creating documents that incorporate executable Python as an integral component. It is "literate Python programming". However it is only a good tool if the end result is a document to be read and shared. I think the Python IDE such as Wing IDE, PyCharm, actually do the REPL and editor model better. But as the saying goes YMMV.


-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder