Re: Poll: Significant Indentation

On Sunday 13 December 2009 06:47:14 pm Florian Gilcher wrote:
> On Dec 13, 2009, at 8:49 PM, David Masover wrote:
> > On Sunday 13 December 2009 06:02:23 pm Florian Gilcher wrote:
> >> Okay, flame on ;)!
> >
> > Well, if you want...
> 
> It was more meant as a joke. Remember: pack irony tags next time ;).

Oh, I got it. The smiley was a dead giveaway, right? :P

> >> Never, such a feature should not be optional.
> >
> > If you mean you hate it so much you don't want to see it, fine.
> >
> > If you mean you'd like to see it go one way or another, that's
> > interesting.
> > Parentheses are often optional in Ruby. I think options are good --
> > coding
> > conventions should be enforced by the project, not the language.
[snip]
> While options are good (I do have my fair share of strange patterns I
> love
> to use as well), you can also over-cramp the language with options. As
> I wrote,
> I would love to see literal Ruby and actually thought about
> implementing it.
> But on such a scale, that would mean two and a half things:
> 
> 1. your project is not accepted and a lot of unnecessary work

That's the purpose of this poll. If there's no interest, I probably won't 
bother.

> 2a. your idea is accepted into core
> 2b. you introduce a hard community split - those who install you
> library and
> those who don't.

I don't see where this is a huge problem. If it really can be a library, there 
are either those who adopt it or those who don't. For example, Rails 
introduces the .map(&:foo) idea, which eventually made it into core. It also 
introduces 5.hours.ago, 2.minutes.from_now, and 'octopus'.pluralize, none of 
which will ever make it into core. And it's far from the only library to hack 
all over core.

It would be especially non-problematic if it had a tool similar to lazibi, so 
that people who absolutely couldn't stand it could convert it back.

But even as it is, we still have a few Lisp people who throw parentheses 
around EVERYTHING in Ruby, a few people moving from C and other languages who 
find it just weird to define a method without parentheses, even if it won't be 
used that way:

def foo(options)
  ...
end
foo :bar => :baz

And of course, we have people who use define_method and other metaprogramming 
techniques, and people who pipe things into eval, and people who store 
configuration as Ruby scripts, and people who store it as Yaml, and people who 
write their own storage format.

I don't think those who cry out in agony at the mere sight of significant-
indentation code will really have more trouble reading and maintaining it than 
I would maintaining lisp-style Ruby.

For that matter, did you know Ruby 1.9 now supports this JSON-like syntax 
natively?

{
  a: 'b',
  c: 5
}
# => {:a=>"b", :c=>5}

The new lambda syntax is cool, too:

-> { puts "I'm a lambda!" }

So I don't think this is an issue -- there are as many ways to write Ruby than 
there are other programming languages, and new versions can add new syntax. I 
think backwards-compatibility and parser manitainability are much bigger 
concerns. That is, if my idea is a complete flop, it shouldn't affect anyone 
else.

By the way: This post is a _defense_ for the idea of alternate syntax. I'm not 
going to start advocating it again just yet.