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.

[Viol8]

Delete the last tab on the last line of a python block. Does the code still run? Almost certainly. Does the interpreter give a warning? Nope.

Now delete the last curly bracket from a C/C++/java block. Does the code compile? Not on your life. And if I have to explain why then you have no business giving an opinion on this topic.

Re:Curly braces = good. Indents = bad.

[dgatwood]

Agreed. And more importantly, if you have braces, it is possible for the IDE to programmatically fix the indentation so that it is easy to read. There's absolutely no sane reason to require a programmer to use whitespace for any reason other than between tokens that would otherwise be a single token if shoved together. All other use should be superfluous, and the IDE should make it readable for you without the need for a person to do it.

And the reason braces should be in every programming language, IMO, is that it makes it easier to jump to the end of a block. When I have nested blocks in a properly braced language, I can hit percent in vi, and I'm at the end of that block. I don't have to move the cursor to the beginning of the line and laboriously hit the down arrow key a line at a time until I find a line that isn't indented as far. Therein lies the path to madness.

Want to dramatically improve the programming world in a single project? Design a meta-language for code formatting so that a set of text-based rules can enforce everybody's own quirky code formatting standards. Make it handle at least the twenty or so most popular programming languages. Then open source it under a BSD license so that the interpreter can be readily built into every IDE on the planet. Then, we can finally dispense with all of these silly programming languages that use whitespace syntactically once and for all.