Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>Nim has made 4 syntax choices that might seem bizarre to a C++ programmer: 1. blocks by indentation instead of braces (aka "Off-Side Rule" syntax [0]); 2. Uniform Function Call Syntax [1][2]; 3. case-insensitivity for identifiers; and 4. dropping empty parens from a function call.

Most of those things are either totally accepted in the PL community (like "Uniform Function Call Syntax") or common and matter of taste, but nothing bad in themselves ("block indentation, paren-less function calls").

Case-insensitivity for identifiers WITH the underscore thing, though, is just plain bad, error prone, hampers auto-completion and IDE intelligence, and is plainly bat-shit crazy. Not to mention opening the stage for tons of bike shedding and holy style wars...

While there were languages with case-insensitivity in the past (especially pre-80s) nobody thinks that it was such a great idea in the first place, and pretty much everybody rejoiced when such features were abandoned.

See, this is why I compare it to Python's OSR syntax.

People react with these strong responses ("plainly bat-shit crazy"). People focus on inconveniences due to the limitations of limited tools ("I don't want to press spacebar FOUR TIMES at the start of EVERY line of code!"). People come up with elaborate worst-case hypotheticals ("What if you want to share your code with someone using a pastebin service that removes leading whitespace?") that just don't happen in practice.

In practice, it's just all upside and no downside. Now I don't need to remember whether it's `openHTTPConnection()`, `openHTTPconnection()`, `open_http_connection()`, `openHttpConnection()`, etc. If I can say it, I know how to type it.

Any ambiguous overloads (same name, same parameter types -- which again, really doesn't occur by accident in practice) will be reported & resolved at compile-time. There's no more mystery in this than there is in any function overloading scenario.

And in practice, it seems to cause the opposite of holy wars: People realize how pointless all those identifier case-wars are in the first place.

There's really not much more that I can say. "In my experience, there's no downside to this feature, only upside."

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