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colejohnson66 · 2022-05-21 16:13:10

It’s simplicity is also it’s crutch. It lacks so many niche things (like math) that every implementation have their own syntax.

illusive4080 | karma 213 | avg karma 2.54 · | 2024-03-29 15:25:39

It’s too simple and refuses to offer any sort of syntactical sugar. Error handling requires lots of boilerplate. No enumerations. Etc etc.

NateDad | karma 2023 | avg karma 1.96 · | 2014-09-30 10:29:41

It's still a vastly simpler language than pretty much any other widely used language out there. Consistency is superseded by pragmatism in the language design.

eloff | karma 14985 | avg karma 3.31 · | 2019-09-29 23:14:11+00:00

The language is simple, the implementation is anything but.

nwmcsween | karma 1122 | avg karma 1.12 · | 2021-08-16 17:33:43

It's meh for a language, it's simple which is what they are trying to achieve but it all comes with trade offs like all programming languages. I would say a large portion of a language is how you mesh with the syntax and tooling around it.

sideshowb | karma 2358 | avg karma 2.25 · | 2019-06-20 07:49:45+00:00

The lack of syntax alone puts me off. E.g. Inability to define an operator for composition

Retra | karma 4460 | avg karma 0.93 · | 2015-12-04 01:10:05+00:00

All the examples where they're useful are contrived.

And simplicity is an actual goal of computer language design.

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chippiewill | karma 1068 | avg karma 4.16 · | 2021-11-26 06:32:37

Being able to do a trivial hello world doesn't make a language elegant.

brundolf | karma 40865 | avg karma 9.15 · | 2021-03-31 17:27:34+00:00

At the risk of inviting a flame-war, it's distressing to me that a language this recent, with such a purported focus on simplicity, has design-problems this fundamental

mseepgood | karma 3572 | avg karma 3.25 · | 2021-08-21 00:38:51

They can simplify code, but they don't simplify the language.

code_duck | karma 8738 | avg karma 1.97 · | 2014-12-23 16:12:40

The implementation being clever in parts does nothing for the language itself.

kbd | karma 3314 | avg karma 4.08 · | 2020-10-25 18:28:00+00:00

It’s a boring language and I avoid it where I can help it. Its facilities for abstraction are too limited, everything is a loop, if err return, and so on. It’s just not a language I’d use by choice for anything.

lucian1900 | karma 4353 | avg karma 1.66 · | 2014-07-03 03:58:04

It's also rather unwieldy to use, much more so than other dependently typed languages (like Idris).

Sadly, despite having useful-looking properties, I suspect it'll serve as little more than inspiration for others.

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fleitz | karma 12602 | avg karma 3.0 · | 2013-10-09 23:47:29+00:00

I'm not talking about how many features the language has, I'm talking about the endless amount of line noise that you need to accomplish simple tasks.

Most of what the code does is hidden behind ceremony.

Imagine Newtown writing out instructions on how to calculate gravity instead of just writing: F = G((m1 m2)/(r^2))

I really don't understand how a language that can't succinctly express calculus from 300 years ago would be regarded as suitable for complex code.

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lucian1900 | karma 4353 | avg karma 1.66 · | 2013-06-27 09:24:37

Those three flaws are brought up repeatedly because they are a sad regression from the current state of the art in programming language construction. It could've been a much nicer language with very little effort, but its designers chose not to do so.

jonathanstrange | karma 4886 | avg karma 3.42 · | 2019-03-25 14:48:14+00:00

Lack of a formal specification and/or an international standard is the real bummer. That's the biggest disadvantage in comparison to languages like Ada and C.

kstenerud | karma 20600 | avg karma 4.89 · | 2020-07-29 18:58:11

It's because it was easy to use, and so people adopted it long before realizing just how many features they needed that it doesn't provide (for example, lack of types). "Simplicity" is a double-edged sword because you can't actually eliminate natural complexity; you can only move it around into (hopefully) more convenient / less chaotic forms.

I've been developing https://concise-encoding.org over the past two years with this in mind.

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meat-eater | karma 74 | avg karma 1.68 · | 2008-04-03 13:57:06+00:00

The biggest barrier in my opinion is what most people think is "weird" syntax or the more precisely the absence of it. People are just not used to it. Add to the that the lack of popular libraries for some modern niceties and it really adds to it being unpopular.

Pxtl | karma 17051 | avg karma 3.07 · | 2020-07-16 03:52:30+00:00

To me it's the lack of some functional features for 1-liners that really trip me up. Verbose function declaration, no null-coalesce operator, no ternary operators, stuff like that.

I love the platform and ideals and goals - a simple, lightweight embedding language... but the language details rub me the wrong way.

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PezzaDev | karma 149 | avg karma 8.28 · | 2018-06-22 13:56:34+00:00

I don't see how a new language can claim to fast and efficient when it does nothing to encourage data-oriented programming.