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Comment by jibal | Hacker News Reader

For Pony in particular, the syntax is not important ... it's simply not the point of the language.

If the syntax is not important, that would mean coding in whitespace or malboge would be as easy as coding in python

The GP is factually wrong. There's plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that language influences thought, and that syntax is therefore important.

Although, I would point out that while your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable (the fact that syntax can make the difference between a very good language and an unusable one), whitespace and malbolge also have terrible semantics that contribute to them being unusable.

As a former Lisp enthusiast (and still an enjoyer), I'd actually use my own darling as an example: Lisps have amazing semantics and are generally good languages. Their syntax is highly regular and structured and easy to parse...except that it's brain-hostile, and I'm convinced that it actively makes it harder to read and write - not just adopt, but actually use.

> There's plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that language influences thought, and that syntax is therefore important.

Are you talking about natural languages here? The so called Sapir Whorf thesis - in its strong or weak form - is rather controversial. There are some interesting findings, but the interpretation of them is still hotly debated.

In any case, none of the studies that I've seen (e.g. about colour perception, spatial reasoning, etc.) seem to be about syntax. I'd have to see some evidence that head-marking language speaker somehow think differently than dependent-marking language speakers and I haven't seen that.

> your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable

it's a valid argument when somebody is speaking in absolutes, but I haven't seen GGP do that. There's a difference between saying "all syntax is completely arbitrary" and "syntax is not the point" - the latter suggests to me that if you stay within certain reasonable bounds (e.g. not be whitespace or malbolge), whether you use significant whitespace of braces, the language looks more like Pascal or like C, etc. are of minor importance in the grand scheme of things. Which is something you may disagree with, but it's a much more reasonable point that anything you can just counter with "but whitspace!".

Thank you for the refreshingly honest and accurate comment.

> The GP is factually wrong. There's plenty of empirical evidence to indicate that language influences thought, and that syntax is therefore important.

I never said anything to the contrary. I specifically stated that syntax was not an important consideration in the design of Pony language. That does not imply the numerous strawmen that you and others attacked here. As Tainnor correctly and honestly noted:

"it's a valid argument when somebody is speaking in absolutes, but I haven't seen GGP do that. There's a difference between saying "all syntax is completely arbitrary" and "syntax is not the point" - the latter suggests to me that if you stay within certain reasonable bounds (e.g. not be whitespace or malbolge), whether you use significant whitespace of braces, the language looks more like Pascal or like C, etc. are of minor importance in the grand scheme of things. Which is something you may disagree with, but it's a much more reasonable point that anything you can just counter with "but whitspace!"."

Having looked at some source examples, I'm pretty sure Pony has syntax errors just like every other parsed language.

We must not be communicating clearly, because that doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with what I wrote. I thought it was clear that the discussion was about the syntactic specifics of programming languages. I certainly wasn't claiming that Pony doesn't have a syntax, or that it's not important to use the correct syntax to write a Pony program.

People like to make themselves sound smart and important by finding the most trivial and low effort ways to discount and invalidate your point, instead of expending effort to respond to a more substantial argument that I could easily read from what you wrote. It's just the nature of online forums I think. It's easy (but incorrect) to conclude this place is full of jerks, because sometimes jerks are more likely to respond at all, and you don't get a baseline of how many people read your message but didn't reply at all.

Yes, thank you. I found the amount of bad faith in the responses is really rather shocking, but you have a good point about self-selection.

I honestly think there's a certain number of people whose insecurities get triggered when they encounter something that they don't immediately understand and instead of concluding that it's not for them or that they lack prerequisite knowledge, they get angry and dismissive.

I even regret using the word "jerks". Even better would be that people get entranced in a tactical mindset of "how do I most efficiently dismantle and invalidate this input?" Which certainly sounds like a jerk, but in reality they aren't even "considering the human" (can't remember which website used that in their guidelines, maybe early reddit?) in the first place. That's all just my pet theory and speculation.

[flagged]

This is textbook no true scotsman fallacy, you're aware, right?

And? Doesn't mean it's not true. It just means you can't use it to win an argument against a nerd.

> Doesn't mean it's not true.

True, it just means that it's idiotic, rather.

oof I'm pretty sure that's a fallacy, let me just consult the manual here...

Keep us updated.

Speaking of fallacies, it's complete nonsense (not the only example of it from that source) to say that the comment in question was a True Scotsman Fallacy (or any other kind of fallacy). Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is very different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

Right, saying that only programmers who don't solve genuine problems and instead merely follow trends and treat it as fashion (and are thus no true scotsman) care about syntax, implying their opinion doesn't count, is definitely not a no true scotsman fallacy. It totally doesn't suggest that true scotsman heed the notion that syntax doesn't matter, and that so by definition, anyone else is just some goober following the cargo cult, so they don't count. [0] /s

And so no,

> Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is very different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

I categorically disagree that these would be meaningfully distinct claims, as the "[only] a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge" bit specifically invokes the implicit disqualification of said Scotsman from being counted as a True Scotsman.

> not the only example of it from that source

Pretty ironic of you to say that.

[0] the literal definition of the no true scotsman fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Only a certain kind of Hacker News would make this reply

And not a word of the response is correct ... it simply repeats errors in logic and fact and a complete failure to understand the salient features of a No True Scotsman fallacy (which is a denial that someone who is by definition a Scotsman is not a TRUE Scotsman ... a distinction that is purely pejorative with no actual semantic content; saying that a "certain sort" of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge indicates disdain for such Scotsmen but is not any sort of fallacy), and throws in some snarky projection ... but my comments are devoid of irony.

If it's a fallacy then it's nonsensical to call it true. But in fact that comment was not at all a True Scotsman Fallacy, or any other kind of fallacy. Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is vastly different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

It's really more of an inversion. No true Scotsman is "No Scotsman would ever (commit murder)" "What about (Scotsman that committed murder)?" "Ok, no true Scotsman would commit murder"

Whereas this follows the form more of "Murder is bad" "I dunno, a lot of Scotsmen commit murder" "Ok, but no true Scotsman would commit murder"

It's the same (annoying) assertion, but the fundamental argument is about the value of murder, not the category of "Scotsmen," so it's not the same extremely obvious fallacy of redefining the literal topic at hand whenever a counterexample is presented.

It's no true scotsman if you just resolve their indirection: no true scotsman would care about syntax, because a true scotsman is someone who doesn't care for such a thing - otherwise, they're people who GP finds to be of low value, and thus their opinion doesn't count, as they're no true scotsman, not true programmers.

It's why I called it an outright textbook example: it's an appeal to purity, where purity is determined in a circular way - the very definition of the no true scotsman fallacy, as far as I could find and understand it.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

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