Rhombus Language 1.0
75 points - last Monday at 5:50 PM
Sourceashton314
today at 1:58 AM
[delayed]
gus_massa
today at 1:24 AM
I was not very involved in this. I still prefer s-expressions.
Anyway, my main initial concern was how to make good macros without s-expressions. There is a nice video by Matthew Flatt in RacketCon 2023. The first 6 minutes and 20 seconds are internal stuff, so skip to the 380s that I added in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLgEL4esYU0&t=380s He takes like another 6 minutes to explain the general idea and make some wishes, and then at the 12m mark he defines macros in Rhombus and makes the wish real in just 2m (with some enhancements later).
spdegabrielle
last Monday at 10:24 PM
Rhombus is designed to be
* approachable and easy to use for everyday purposes, with a readable indentation syntax; and
* uniquely customisable with an _open-compiler API_ that is accessible to a wide audience.
cptmurphy
yesterday at 6:25 AM
Racket is already approachable and easy to use for everyday purposes
bjoli
yesterday at 10:26 AM
A lot of people hate sexprs. Even seemingly reasonable folks.
I imagined they have met students that really struggle with the syntax, while grokking the concepts easily.
I myself have heard "the parentheses are hard to balance" and "after a while you dont even see the parentheses" enough times that I think maybe both can be correct.
ginko
yesterday at 11:59 PM
Adding significant whitespace to a new language feels like a bad choice. It's not terrible but I do think it was a bad call for Python in hindsight.
pasquinelli
today at 12:31 AM
why do you think it was a bad choice?
It‘s a source of problems with mismatched tabs/spaces being used for indentation between team members for fairly little upside.
Imo it also makes moving blocks of code more cumbersome.