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Comment by tigershark | Hacker News Reader

He can't find the documentation for the pipeline operator. And he posted examples from ReasonML rather than F# and OCaml. For reference this is the documentation for the pipeline operator in F#: https://msdn.microsoft.com/visualfsharpdocs/conceptual/opera... It's kind of sad that people nowadays know only JavaScript and languages from the web ignoring the original language from where the syntax come from. I would not be surprised if he posted some purescript instead of Haskell. As per the "modern" languages in the title the author has no idea about what he is speaking about. OCaml is 21 years old, just 1 year younger than Java, I would not call it a "modern" language. But if someone thinks that the code he posted exists only in ReasonML than that one can be defined a modern language. I rarely criticise blog post, but this one is just not well written and the author has no idea about this subject.

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I updated the article to make more clear that examples are from modern languages, but many of the ideas come from older languages.

> All the examples above are from Reason, Swift, Kotlin and Dart. However, many of the ideas above can already be found in much older languages such as Lisp (1958), Smalltalk (1972), Objective-C (1984), Haskell (1990), OCaml (1996) and many more. So while the examples are from modern languages, the ideas in this article are actually very old. (*)

> You could say that those “modern” languages are trying to popularise old ideas. They put the idea in a different more common syntax while also leveraging older ecosystems. All the languages in this article use the popular C-style syntax. For example, Reason is OCaml in a C-style/Javascript-style syntax while also leveraging the JavaScript and OCaml ecosystem and Dart is heavily influenced by Smalltalk and leverages the Javascript ecosystem.

You have to call ideas from 30 years ago "modern" languages in order to distinguish them from retrograde bullshit like Go.

> but this one is just not well written and the author has no idea about this subject.

Rubbish. The examples are good. The author comes across as enthusiastic. The writing style is fine and engaging. A couple of the examples are from a modern variant of an older language but so what? That small oversight and you completely bash the effort?

You could have said,

"The writing didn't do it for me and the author has more to learn about the subject" but you came out with the big stick instead. You come across like a typical elitist functional programmer. Blah, blah, blah, Lisp had that _forty_ years ago, lame!

I thought the language features were interesting. I'd read up on Kotlin but overlooked the it keyword, I'd love if Ruby got that. In fact, I was trying to figure out which features Ruby has the whole time. Ruby blocks (closures?) are cool with the || operator but having a default it keyword, we should totally steal that. In total I think Ruby has #5 Destructuring, #7 If Expressions, #10 Method Extensions (called Open Classes in Ruby I think) – correct me if I'm wrong. Ruby kind of does pattern matching with the case statement/expression. The Pipeline Operator looks cool. I don't think Ruby has anything like the Cascade operator either.

>> You come across like a typical elitist functional programmer. Blah, blah, blah, Lisp had that _forty_ years ago, lame!

This is a personal attack that's entirely uncalled for.

Also, the OP never said anything about Lisp. It is really not productive to bring such loaded assumptions into a comment thread.

I'm sorry, I don't know what are you used to read, but writing an example and after that just pointing at the documentation (or at something completely unrelated like in the first example) is not an example of good writing. You are forced to follow the link and it breaks your flow. The it keyword is also not original in kotlin. Groovy has it for example. The author is just getting random features that have been around for decades mistakenly believing that some modern language introduced it.

Your attack is completely non-sense, I don't know lisp and I don't like it. Furthermore in my day to day job I write only OO code (sadly). And I certainly don't think that my post is rubbish given that I explained the reasons for my criticism.

To be fair, he doesn't explicitly say "these features were invented in Kotlin/Dart/...". He just says he hadn't read about them before.

I think perhaps the core sentiment of GP's comment is, "Dang, I didn't learn anything from this article."

It's super great that more and more people are learning about these cool features that have actually been around for a while.

It's super disappointing that none of this was new to me. Oh well.

GP is right, and you're the one being harsh and offensive. It is indeed a shame to see people thinking 30 year old ideas are new because they are uninformed. Humanity is supposed to progress, not spin its wheels.

The post is indeed uninformed and poorly researched. I would rather not see it posted.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Apt, and a little more human.

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