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Comment by hillcapital | Hacker News Reader

They recently changed the syntax to add parens, commas and use `|arg|` for closures :)

https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/releases/tag/0.0.0-alpha2-ro...

Are the Roc people really doing everything they can to ruin everything they had going for them? Appealing to those who know nothing and won't be willing to touch anything FP at the cost of annoying those who actually want to try it is just so stupid

I say this as someone who enjoys reading Rust more than Haskell or Elm -- that looks like a really bad idea for aesthetic reasons anyway. I mean if you want the syntax to look like Zig or Rust, perhaps go all the way there instead of making a kind of a mutant hybrid like this. Syntax is superficial and the semantics actually matter, but that doesn't mean the syntax can be just anything.

Is there some deeper technical reason for making such changes?

Boooo

oh wow it went from being a very clear language to looking more like a hodgepodge of a few different languages.

Ah great improvements! I don't know why the sibling comments are so negative; this is clearly better.

Why? I'm used to \ meaning lambda. I understand you aren't, and that's fine. But it's just your weird opinion determined by what programming languages you've learned.

Ultimately, it's just syntax and not so important. Semantics are important.

> Why? I'm used to \ meaning lambda.

1. I know what lambda calculus is, and I didn't even make the connection between \ and lambda. It's pretty tenuous.

2. Most programmers do not know what lambda calculus is. This is supposed to be a friendly language, not an obscure academic one.

3. It's not even the same lambda as in lambda calculus, e.g. it takes multiple arguments.

4. Lambda was a reasonable choice in lambda calculus since it's a very "mathsy" language, and it's pretty much the only symbol in the language. It's a pretty awful choice for a practical programming language though - there's a reason 99% of languages use something like `fn` or `fun` or `function` or `def` instead of lambda to define top-level functions.

I'm not a huge fan of `|foo|` either to be honest - I don't see why you can't simply use the same syntax for anonymous and named functions - but it is at least a little better.

If it were up to me I'd go with something like

  fn double(a: list[int]) -> list[int] {
    a.map(fn(i) { i * 2 })
  }

Same syntax; just allow omitting the name and inferring the types. I can't recall any languages that do that though so maybe there's some tricky reason it can't work?

Right now I’m in between liking Gleam or Roc for a hobby functional language. The syntax you wrote is Gleam[1], well aside from it being List(). It’s very approachable, very consistent and that’s a core goal.

Roc was appealing because it was slightly more distinct and more unique. Plus it was more focused on speed. I appreciate them wanting to become more approachable. The new syntax seems less approachable to me because it’s now a half step between approachable Haskell and what feels like a combination of Ruby and Python.

[1]: https://gleam.run/

Roc does use the same syntax for anonymous and named functions, both before and after the recent syntax changes.

I think because a closure is not a function as a closure can capture its environment, in a way that functions can't, so using the same syntax for closures and functions can be misleading (even though languages like JS do it)

I dunno, I could say that functions do capture their environment (global variables are captured by reference).

I don't really see how it would be misleading.

> Most programmers do not know what lambda calculus is

I would frankly be shocked if a 4 year syllabus in CS these days just skipped any mention of Alonzo Church, especially considering that it's fundamental to functional programming and theoretical computer science...

Maybe it's not taught in "CS" programs that are actually just "practical software engineering" bootcamps with extra steps. The real nerds know about lambdas. They're even literally called that in Ruby (and possibly other languages).

FYI: I have a computer science degree. I never learned any functional programming, nor lambda calculus during university. I learned about both topics in my late 30s as a professional.

I find this insane, considering how important I find it now.

Honestly, I didn't take enough CS to get into functional langs, but I did learn what a lambda was. The importance of it all came later, after years of struggling with bugs in million-line codebases that wouldn't have even existed in an immutable, functional language without inheritance.

Your school should lose its accreditation. Your programme is an absolute failure and sounds like they called their software engineering programme computer science

Brace yourself... most programmers don't have a CS degree.

Yes really.

Depends on where they are on the globe.

In many places that won't get them through HR, nor calling oneself Software Engineer is legally allowed without a corresponding degree.

It cannot be

There can't be a more democratized language than Python and in Python closures are defined literally using lambda keyword

I guarantee that 99% of Python programmers just think that's a weird way of saying an anonymous function.

Hell I used lambda functions in C++ for years without knowing what lambda calculus is. And C++ doesn't even use `lambda`.

Sure, but that also means this kind of syntax does not alienate people just because they don't know what lambda calculus is. And they will appreciate it even more when one day they get curious and look up why it is called a lambda

Pretty much all of those changes look bad to me.

Jesus, why? This is a bummer.

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