What if you want to change the first item of a list? If you're going for smallest diff (which I'm not even convinced is a worthwhile consideration in language design), then allover's example is clearly superior to Elm's current convention.
>What if you want to change the first item of a list?
Html.program
{ view = view
, update = update
}
Html.program
{ view = newView
, update = update
}
I mean, there are quite a bunch of languages that don't support non-terminating commas, which is really a bit of parsing that hides intent.
Other than that, bashing a language for having the convention (that is not forced by the language but by... convention) is quite ridiculous. The HTML comment is a valid point to raise, but there is quite a good reason for having it be native Elm, which brings a ton more benefits than having JSX'esgue syntax.
[ 1
, 2
, 3
]
[ 0
, 1
, 2
, 3
]
- [ 1
+ [ 0
+ , 1
, 2
, 3
]
It is forced slightly by the language as trailing commas are currently invalid syntax (though this is on the roadmap to be fixed). It's also more than just a convention, as it is explicitly recommended in the official Elm docs.
Putting commas on the left-hand side means they're out of your way once and for all.
The versioning diff argument is much less interesting. Most people don't care about that.