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Comment by LittlePeter | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, let num = 10 is not bullshit free, num = 10 is.

Implicit declaration is bullshit. It allows new variables to accidentally be created out of typos.

Sabre should have gone with var. Without knowledge of existing languages, the meaning of let isn’t exactly obvious.

I'd say that a knowledge of mathematics is where the meaning of "let" will most often come from. I'm sure we've all read things like "Let x be the speed of a train..."

I don’t like “let” because of my math dept in school was all “= is pronounced is” for some reason (long time ago)

“let n is 10”

Tear some hair out every time, as I can’t get my brain to stop

Why would the pronunciation of the equals sign not be "equals"?

Let n be the number of comments about syntax in this thread and let total be the number of comments: n / total.

let num = 10

spot the typo

That's highly subjective. I see where you're coming from, but I personally think that num = 10 is weird to read.

Well, there is an argument for := or <- for assignments.

> there is an argument

Lol

I personally don't consider that syntax bs-free. When coming from another language, it's quite likely that you haven't encountered that syntax before.

Anyone who grew up with Pascal has seen := a lot. On a personal note, I do hate the overloading of =.

It’s not entirely subjective. For the majority of languages with a `let` keyword, it creates a binding which can’t be reassigned. JS is the only major language I’m aware of that breaks this expectation, and uses `const` instead.

In fact, I had assumed Sabre followed the more common pattern, and was quite surprised to discover it doesn’t later in the docs. I think that’s a pretty clear case of “bullshit” in the sense described in the README.

> For the majority of languages with a `let` keyword, it creates a binding which can’t be reassigned. JS is the only major language I’m aware of that breaks this expectation

The whole BASIC family, including the VB subfamily, also breaks it, though in some (including VB) LET is an optional noise keyword and not required.

That’s fair and a reasonable contradiction. Though I’d say that’s more in line with the huge range of optional keywords in SQL that are more a matter of readability preference than syntax.

Variables are overrated. 10 is BS-free.

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