Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

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I'm 34 and I don't like this, so it's definitely not only those above 35. Jokes aside, I would say I'm a minimalist and this is where my resistance comes from. One of the things that I dislike the most in programming is feature creep. I prefer smaller languages. I like the idea of having a more minimal feature set that doesn't change very much. In a language with less features, you might have to write slightly more code, but the code you write will be more readable to everyone else. Said language should also be easier to learn.

IMO, the more complex a system is, the more fragile it tends to become. The same is true for programming languages. Features will clash with each other. You'll end up having 10 different ways to achieve the same thing, and it won't be obvious which direction to go.

Furthermore, I did my grad studies in compilers. I've thought about writing an optimizing JIT for Python. I really feel like CPython is needlessly slow, and it's kind of embarassing, in an age where single-core performance is reaching a plateau, to waste so many CPU cycles interpreting a language. We have the technology to do much better. However, the fact that Python is a fast moving target makes it very difficult to catch up. If Python were a smaller, more stable language, this wouldn't be so difficult.

> In a language with less features, you might have to write slightly more code, but the code you write will be more readable to everyone else.

I disagree with this, which is precisely why I prefer feature rich languages like Java or better yet Kotlin. It doesn't get much more readable than something like:

  users.asSequence()
    .filter { it.lastName.startsWith("S") }
    .sortedBy { it.lastName }
    .take(3)

Now try writing that in Go or Python and compare the readability.

A little off-topic but how does that work? Is 'it' a magic variable referring to the first argument? Never seen magic variables that blend into lambdas like that before... would've expected $1 or something like that.

Yeah, a bit of PG’s Arc influence in the wild.

I believe groovy made this popular rather than arc, and it's likely where kotlin's come from, due to being in the java ecosystem.

Most apl deviatives (j, k, q, a) all had implicit arguments for functions that didn't explicitly declare them (up to 3: x, y, and z).

Probably before then too.

Dyalog APL too, but none of them call the implicit argument "it".

Groovy is from 2003. PG keynoted PyCon in 2003 talking about his progress on Arc: http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html. He had been talking about Arc online for a couple of years at that point, including in particular the convenience of "anaphoric macros" that defined the identifier "it" as an implicit argument.

(He'd also written about that more at length in the 1990s in On Lisp, but many more people became acquainted with his language-design ideas in the 2001–2003 period, thanks to Lightweight Languages and his increasingly popular series of essays.)

But surely Perl's $_ was way more influential than an obscure PG talk. I was reading PG way back in 2004, and I had never heard of anaphoric macros until now.

Wait, you think that, in the context of programming language design, a PyCon keynote is an obscure talk? I don't know what to say about that. It might be possible for you to be more wrong, but it would be very challenging.

Anyway, I'm talking specifically about the use of the identifier "it" in Kotlin, not implicitly or contextually defined identifiers in general, which are indeed a much more widespread concept, embracing Perl's $_ and @_, awk's $0 (and for that matter $1 and $fieldnumber and so on), Dyalog APL's α and ω, Smalltalk's "self", C++'s "this", dynamically-scoped variables in general, and for that matter de Bruijn numbering.

> a PyCon keynote is an obscure talk

Compared to the existence of Perl, yes. Anyone who does any amount of Perl learns that $_ is the implicit argument ("like 'it'") to most functions. It's pretty much one of Perl's main deals. The talk has about 100K views on YouTube, which is pretty good, but Perl is in another league.

Too bad Apache Groovy itself didn't remain popular after popularizing the name "it" for the much older idea of contextually-defined pronouns in programming languages. Using the names of pronouns in English (like "this" and "it") is easier for an English-speaking programmer to understand than symbols like "$1" or "_". But because of Groovy's bad project management, another programming language (Kotlin) is becoming widely known for introducing the "it" name.

The idea of anaphoric macros[1] is first found in Paul Graham's "On Lisp"[2] and is based on the linguistic concept of anaphora, an expression whose meaning depends on the meaning of another expression in its context. An anaphor (like "it") is such a referring term.

I think if you like this idea, you will really like the book. Better still, you can download the pdf for free.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_macro [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

Inside of any lambda that takes a single parameter you can refer to the parameter as 'it'. If you prefer to name your parameters you can do so as well, it's just slightly more verbose:

  users.asSequence()
    .filter { user -> 
      user.lastName.startsWith("S") 
    }
    .sortedBy { user -> 
      user.lastName 
    }
    .take(3)

sorted(u for u in users if u.last_name.startswith("S"), key=lambda u: u.last_name)[:3]

Though I will conceed that I also find the fluent interface variant nicer.

That doesn't parse :-)

Python is a little more readable, but both Python and Kotlin are perfectly clear in this case:

    sorted((u for u in users
           if u.last_name.startswith("S")),
           key=lambda u: u.last_name
    )[:3]

If last_name is a function, which it often would be in Python, it gets better:

    sorted((u for u in users
           if last_name(u).startswith("S")),
           key=last_name
    )[:3]

However, I think you probably got the sort key wrong if you're taking the first three items of the result. Maybe you meant key=abuse_score, reverse=True, or something.

I disagree this python version is as readable and here’s why. It’s about as many characters but more complex. The Kotlin version performs several distinct actions, each being clear to its purpose. These actions have the same syntax (eg requires less parsing effort). The Python version mixes at least 4 different language syntax/features, being list comprehension, if special form in the list comprehension, keywords, and lambda functions.

On top of the lessened readability, the Kotlin version makes it very easy to add, subtract, or comment out lines/actions which really helps when debugging. The Kotlin version is almost identical in structure to how you’d do it in Rust, Elixir, etc.

I agree. I don't know Kotlin and am reasonably well versed in Python, yet I immediately grasp the Kotlin example as more readable, while having to squint at the Python one for a few seconds. (this is anecdotal of course, and does not account for the example possibly being contrived)

One thing that I like more in the Python version is that it contains less names: .asSequence and .take are replaced by operators of much greater generality, while the ugly implicitly declared identifier it is replaced by explicitly deciding that sequence elements are u.

It should also be noted that Python would allow a more functional style, possibly leaving out the list comprehension.

I think you're all fighting for nothing here.

The map filter chaining is obviously simpler, but python code is not that difficult and it's a no brainer task anyway.

It's true the Python is still relatively easy. It may only take, say, 1.3 sec vs 1.1 to parse, but it adds up.

It's surprising to me that there are people who disagree with my opinion about this, but it suggests that my familiarity with Python has damaged my perspective. You're clearly much less familiar with Python (this code doesn't contain any list comprehensions, for example), so I think your opinion about readability is probably a lot more objective than mine.

> this code doesn't contain any list comprehensions, for example

It does contain a generator expression though, which is the same as a list comprehension in general structure, but slightly more confusing because it doesn't have the relationship to lists that square brackets in a list comprehension would have given it.

Yes, it shares the structure of a list comprehension, but has different semantics. In this case a listcomp would have worked just as well.

My point, though, was that not being able to tell the difference was a key "tell" that the comment author was not very familiar with Python — in some contexts, that would tend to undermine credibility in their comment (and then it would be rude to point it out), but in this context, it probably makes their opinion more objective.

Good point, though it's less my familiarity with Python and more that I tend to simplify and call generator expressions as list comprehensions unless the laziness is important to call out (meta laziness there? ;) ). Mainly since L.C.'s were first and describing the differences is tedious.

FWIW most of the programming I've ever done has been in Python, and while I have no trouble understanding either snippet, I think that the Kotlin snippet is much clearer in intent and structure.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that only someone unfamiliar with Python could prefer the Kotlin version! Perhaps you thought I meant that, but I didn't.

This isn't very readable at all and certainly not any more readable than a chain of method calls, being that you've spread the operations out in different places. It's not even syntactically obvious what the `key` argument is passed to if one doesn't know that `sorted` takes it. None of those problems exist when piping through normal functions or chaining method calls.

Python is for the most part overrated when it comes to these things, IMO. It's a nice enough language but it's aged badly and has an undeserved reputation for concision, readability and being "simple".

C# supports both conventions (in LINQ) - I mean the Kotlin one from the grandparent comment, and the Python's from parent's.

The method chaining syntax and the query syntax are alternatives. I think most devs lean towards the former, considered to be cleaner... whereas the latter is probably easier to learn in the beginning, to those unfamiliar with piping/functional style - owing to its SQL feel-alikeness.

ReSharper would offer converting the latter to the former, and that's how I learned method-chaining LINQ back in the day.

Pretty sure the Go community will be fine with not being feature rich, since simplicity, maintainability and getting new people up to speed matter more for them.

The go community have gone to far the other way for me, the endless repetition introduces its own complexity.

Simple core languages that are syntactically extensible with libraries have the best of both worlds: https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/2018-01-06-so-yeah-abou...

You’re doing it wrong :)

  users.apply {
      asSequence()
      filter { it.lastName.startsWith("S")
      sortedBy { it.lastName }
      take(3)
  }

(totally untested)

Furthermore, I did my grad studies in compilers. I've thought about writing an optimizing JIT for Python. I really feel like CPython is needlessly slow, and it's kind of embarassing,

Many have tried and failed, Google and Dropbox to name a couple, and countless other attempts.

Yes, and part of the reason they failed is the reason I pointed to: Python is a fast moving target, with an increasing number of features.

It's not the new features of Python that make it hard to optimize; it's the fundamental dynamic nature of the language that was there from day one. Syntactic sugar doesn't have an impact one way or the other on optimizing Python.

The new features aren't just syntactic, they're also new libraries that come standard with CPython, etc. If you want to implement a Python JIT that people will use, you have to match everything CPython supports. Furthermore, since the people behind CPython don't care about JIT, you also can't count on them not adding language features that will break optimizations present in your JIT. You can't count on these being just "syntactic sugar". Even if you could though, in order to keep up it means you have to use CPython's front-end, or constantly implement every syntactic tweak CPython does.

Lastly, AFAIK, CPython's FFI API is actually more of a problem than the dynamic semantics of the language. You can expose Python objects directly to C code. That makes it very hard for a JIT to represent said Python objects in an efficient way internally.

It lags a bit in releases, but I understood pypy to be essentially successful?

Yes, PyPy is fantastic for long-running processes that aren't primarily wrappers around C code. In my experience, the speedups you see in its benchmarks translate to the real world very well.

> In a language with less features, you might have to write slightly more code, but the code you write will be more readable to everyone else.

That's not universally true. C# has more features than Java but is generally easier to read and the intent of the code is easier to follow. The lack of features, like properties or unsigned integers, leads to Java coders creating much more convoluted solutions.

If languages with less features were universally better we would all be using C and BASIC for everything.

I think the importance is the orthogonality of the features. Eg. having so many ways to do string formatting or now multiple ways of doing assigments are not ortogonal and thus can be seen as cluttering.

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