A huge +1 and hugs and kisses for your entire post. And I didn't say anything like Mikeal's paraphrase, and the ES6 harmony:proposals bear this out (<| is unsexy in my current font!).
It's especially important not to discount shorthands and sugar for cliché, even though they could be replaced by equivalent long-hand. English does not only have "is not". It has "isn't" as well, and we're better off for that kind of contraction. Yes, this makes it harder to teach -- I know, I have a 7 and a 6 year old learning the rules right now, along with the raft of irregular verbs in English that such children need to know -- but learners manage. /be On Oct 4, 2011, at 12:59 PM, Bob Nystrom wrote: > > > On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Mikeal Rogers <[email protected]> > wrote: > > My main concern with *some* of the proposals is that I feel they add features > and clever syntax for experts at the expense of keeping the language easy to > understand for new programmers. > > It's hard to satisfy both sets of users here. It's important to try and do > our best, but many things are trade-offs. I don't think we can declare "thou > shalt not change the language in a way that makes it harder for new users". > If we can make things much better for working Javascripters at a small > expense to newcomers, that may be a worthwhile trade-off or it may not. We > should be open to making wise decisions like that, while remaining > sympathetic to everyone who is writing JS. > > I'm a big fan of let, but if you don't deprecate var we're going to have to > contend with new programmers keeping two sets of scoping rules in their head. > > I would love to kill var. With fire. > > Generators.... so a function is sometimes a constructor, sometimes a > function, and sometimes it's a generator?!?! Explain that in one paragraph > that new programmers can understand, I dare you. > > Because I can never refuse a dare... > > A constructor is different from a regular function. Instead of returning the > value that the body of the function returns, it returns a special > newly-created object. Likewise, a generator is a special function that > doesn't return what the body returns. Instead, it returns an object that lets > you interrupt and resume that function. This object exposes a next() method. > When you call that, the function runs until it hits a yield. When it does, > the function is paused at that point, and the result of the yield is returned > from next(). The next time you call next() it picks up from there and > continues. > > Brendan said something very interesting in his talk at JSConf.eu, he said > that because of the way TC39 works any new proposal that doesn't have (and I > hope I'm paraphrasing this right) "sexy syntax to start with doesn't have > much of a chance". > > Brendan knows better than I, but often I feel that we have the opposite > problem. If all you're proposing is syntax, it's easy for anyone to shoot it > down by saying "You can already do that now." There's a fundmental difference > between utility (can we do it all, ever, regardless of how many fingers we > lose in the process) and usability (is it discoverable, easy, clear, > pleasurable and not error-prone). > > Because we're programmers we have a tendency to ignore usability concerns > because they take more work to demonstrate. We like nice clear boolean > switches: "I couldn't do this and now I can!" It's less satisfying for many > of us to say "Now people encounter 17% fewer errors when doing this!" > > Personally, I don't think that's the right way to look at things. Arguing > from that angle pretty quickly turns into a Turing tarpit. I believe the > entire reason we create languages is for usability. I think syntax does > matter, because syntax is the user interface of the semantics. I rarely have > complaints about JavaScript's semantics (except for var) but I find its > notation awkward in some places. Improving those would make me more > productive and make JS more fun for me to use. > > - bob > _______________________________________________ > es-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
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