A New Programming Language Expands on Google's Go (infoworld.com)

"One sure sign your language is successful: When people build other languages that transpile into it." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: The Have project uses Go's toolchain, but sports a different syntax and makes key additions to the language... Previously, a language named Oden worked with Go's toolchain to add features that Go didn't support. Now Polish developer Marcin Wrochniak has introduced Have, a language that transpiles to and expands on Go.

In the blog post that introduces the project to Go developers, Wrochniak describes Have as a hobby project, with the goal of becoming a "companion" to Go that addresses some of its common "landmines"... Go uses curly braces in the manner of C/C++, while Have uses block indents, like Python... The way that variable declaration, structs, and interfaces work have all been modified in Have to be more consistent with each other and to avoid internal inconsistencies that Wrochniak feels are a common source of bugs.

Comments

Re: Curly braces = good. Indents = bad.

[ahankinson]

So you're saying a) you have a team that doesn't know how to turn on the 'show whitespace' characters option in every single IDE / code editor, b) a team that doesn't follow a style guide that dictates whether you must use tabs or spaces, and to know why this is important, and c) an important consideration for your work is how to copy and paste code from Stack Overflow. If you get stuck up on indents being a problem, I'll respectfully submit that it's not the language's fault...

Re:Curly braces = good. Indents = bad.

[dbrueck]

I think I get the point you're trying to make, but I'm a bit dubious - it's a syntactically valid change, so there's no reason for the tool to complain. That's in the same class of errors as deleting a digit from a constant, accidentally pressing '+' instead of '-', removing the '=' from a '=' expression, and so on.

I personally don't care if certain people like Python or not - language preference is often fairly subjective. I'm doubtful, however, about claims that the indenting is bad in any objective way - I've seen too many people use it for too many years on too many projects without it being a problem. I mean, don't you think this would be tripping people up constantly if it were a real issue in practice?

I've watched veteran devs pick up Python as well as recent college grads pick it up, and this just isn't an issue. I can maybe/kinda/sorta almost convince myself that I've just been extraordinarily lucky to have never had this be a problem, but for it to not be a common problem for all of those other people, on all of those other projects? Nah, it just doesn't add up. Everything I've seen suggests that this is a problem that could occur in theory, but rarely if ever does in practice.

Re: Curly braces = good. Indents = bad.

[Dutch Gun]

I'd bet it's about as much an exaggeration as people claiming that C++'s operator overloading hides all sorts of crazy logic and performance pitfalls. I've been programming in C++ for decades on million-line projects, and not once have I seen anything like that.

I've actually been programming in Python the past few months. Because the indentation require aligns with what you naturally do as a programmer, it hasn't seemed all that problematic to me.

C++ has a ton of really nasty, subtle pitfalls that you just have to learn to avoid through rigorous self-discipline: Don't forget to initialize your variables. Don't forget your virtual destructor. Don't return and use the address of a temporary variable. Don't screw up your copy and move constructors. Etc, etc. Seen all of these cause issues that were tricky to track down in real life.

I dunno, in practice C++ still seems a hell of a lot trickier to use than Python, so I have a hard time getting worked up about indentation when I'm using to working in a language with beartraps and landmines liberally sprinkled throughout it. Maybe I'll have a different opinion if I work on it longer.