On Monday, 27 August 2018 at 04:00:18 UTC, John Carter wrote:
Rather the assumption must be, a language processor eats
source, it can (re)write source as well.
And before any one mentions halting problems and the
impossibility of a compiler understanding whether a refactoring
is behaviour altering.....
My empirical experience with this is, most recent advances in
language design have been around making it harder to make stupid
mistakes.
And whenever I have found a chunk of pre-existing code that
required substantial modification to update it to the new
language paradigm... it was because it was buggy already, and
attempting to express the current behaviour in latest preferred
idiomatic way made that obvious.
ie. It was hard to move that code to latest preferred idiom
because it require a bug fix AND a syntactic tweak.
ie. That code was working "by accident" or not at all.
The older I get the less sympathy and mercy I have for code that
works "by accident" and the more I encourage language designers
to evolve our tools faster to give us more safety from our own
inexhaustible supply of stupidity.
