Creator of JSON Unveils New Programming Language 'Misty' | Hacker News Reader

Creator of JSON Unveils New Programming Language 'Misty'

crockford.com

4 pointsmonkburger6 comments

Crockford has not "unveiled" Misty. He's never formally announced the existence of this language AFAIK. He has a blog, but he hasn't made a blog post about Misty.

Misty has been around since 2010. The earliest snapshot <https://web.archive.org/web/20171025001743/crockford.com/mis...> of the Misty language page on archive.org is from October 2017, and that page says "(c) 2010 Douglas Crockford".

Not only has Crockford not announced the language, but he's provided no commentary, metadata or explanation about it. From looking at archive.org snapshots, we can see that the language has changed over time, but there is no metadata from Crockford about this. No versions numbers or releases. And there is no public implementation.

So I think this is an unannounced hobby project.

> The language is quite strict in its use of spaces and indentation. [...]Misty instead allows only one convention which is strictly enforced. This liberates programmers to focus their attention on more important matters.

I understand the motive, but regardless that makes it an instant no-go for me.

Out of curiosity, why? If whitespace is merely an artifact of human readability, why permit (or why not restrict) infinite bikeshedding on that?

I'll bite. Code is read more often than it is written. Readability leads to comprehension (or detracts from it). So forcing a programmer to lay out code in the designer's favorite format is a net negative for people who can read it easier laid out a different way. Thus, the number of IDE formatters and options we have in languages like JS.

There being no known metric for how _readable_ semantically isomorphic whitespace changes make code, but there being _many_ ways of measuring how much time is spent on shifting whitespace around, I tend to think language communities like Go and gofmt are on to something. Assuming the language actually has a community then it’s not exactly the designer’s preference, ultimately, it’s the community’s.

Much props to Doug and his previous work, but this seems like a terrible idea.

There is no clear advantage over JS/TS and the use of invisible characters to have such a dramatic effect on syntax is a non-starter.

Today's IDEs let us format and find errors in code laid out in many different ways. (Prettier, etc.). Why would we give that up?

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