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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

> Can you spot the mistake?

Nope, so now I have no incentive to use your config format because it's established something is wrong and it's completely non-obvious.

Thanks for not wasting my time, I guess.

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This opinion is ironic because this is exactly what the author intended to describe -- the typo IS hard to find.

The "Hello, World" example is nothing more than JSON, showing a string repeated 3 times. On the third time, "bill" is misspelled with "blil". The next tab shows how Dhall uses a variable definition to prevent this type of error.

I took it to mean "can you find the syntax error". It wasn't clear they meant the text

Yeah, I eventually caught it but wished I hadn't wasted my time on it - seems like something they could better have shown with an animation

I too spent the whole time scrutinizing the syntax and ignoring the values, since this is an intro to the language and not to Bill’s dotfiles. I was ultimately unable to deduce the presumed syntax error and independently came to the same misconclusion.

It can't be a syntax error though as it evaluates successfully as demonstrated by the right-hand side.

In general, if you think that someone’s claimed experience doesn’t make sense, you’re probably just missing information.

On small viewports, the “right-hand side” is down page and off screen, and the instructions I’m following reference only tabs visible above.

I mean... from context, it's probably a mistake, but on the other hand we don't actually know the structure of that filesystem or the author's intentions.

Sure, but how do I know that the user doesn't store their public key in /home/blil?

They are trying to tell a story about how Dhall helps you avoid hard to notice errors, but they aren't doing a great job.

Would be cool if they had a three panel story:

* using json with the typo

* using dhall with the typo

* using dhall with variables to avoid the typo

Might be easier to understand.

Meh, I think you're pointing out why doing this with a variable is better. In other words that mistake is the entire point of the example. Perhaps the definitions tab could make it more clear what the mistake was.

Yeah, I spent 3 minutes looking for a syntax error in 5 lines of code. I couldn’t find anything. I’m obviously too dumb to figure out this language so I guess I’ll just stick with YAML.

How could they make the mistake obvious? It's a mistake in a string value!

It had me confused too. I figured I was looking for a syntax error in the config format since it’s an introduction…to the config format.

How about not making the very first thing on the page a confusing puzzle?

They should at least reveal the answer somewhere immediately close by. I couldn't spot the error after a few minutes, came to the comments to find out what it was. Not a great introduction because you're asking someone to spot an error in something they don't know the syntax or ruleset for.

The project looks cool though.

Change the name from Bill to John/Jhon. That's more obvious than all the barcode characters next to each other.

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