Significant indentation requires a more complex lexer because it means the lexical grammar is no longer regular. The lexer can't just be a finite state machine, instead it has to maintain a stack of previous indentation levels.

But I don't think many modern languages have a regular lexical grammar anyway. Without significant indentation, some other features still require the lexer to maintain a stack - e.g. string interpolation (Python's f-strings).

https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-805-safe-parallel-python/10...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508906

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

The original Go team was trying to avoid this:

"Java, JavaScript (ECMAScript), Typescript, C#, C++, Hack (PHP), and more [...] actively borrow features from one another. They are converging into a single huge language." [0]

That team has since moved on, and now Go has begun to join that convergence.

The problem is that most programmers seem to want to write Java, more-or-less. New, simpler languages come along, but once they get popular, the pressure is on to turn them into Java-likes. It happened to Python and now it’s happening to Go. It takes a strong will for language maintainers to say “no”, and their language will suffer in popularity as a result - see, for example, Ruby.

[0] https://go.dev/talks/2015/simplicity-is-complicated.slide#5

It absolutely was, but IMO was never going to happen. Python has a reputation as a simple language, but it really isn’t. It’s a very complex language hiding behind friendly syntax.

I think once the Mojo team realised that, they had to adjust their expectations.

OTOH Python itself is the world’s most popular programming language, yet has only recently had the money to support more than a single full-time developer.

Functional-style programming has become much more popular since Python was designed in the 1990s, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to have Python-like significant indentation and also support true anonymous functions.

Not any more. That was the initial announcement, but I think then somebody actually looked at Python and realised what a complex language it is - so they refocused on being a Python-like language. Python has a reputation for being a simple language, but in reality it isn’t at all.

No AI would have been able to find it if asked to "Find a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture. Make no mistakes".

  6 weeks * 7 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds:

    6 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60
  = 6 * 7 * (3 * 8) * (4 * 5 * 3) * (3 * 2 * 10)
  = 6 * 7 * 3 * 8 * 4 * 5 * (3 * 3) * 2 * 10
  = 6 * 7 * 3 * 8 * 4 * 5 * 9 * 2 * 10
  = 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 * 7 * 8 * 9 * 10

Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?

A lot of these changes make sense (although some of them are a bit too TIMTOWTDI for my taste) - but perhaps LuaJIT 3 would benefit from a change of name as well? Certainly with all these changes, it would be more like a separate language than merely a JIT-compiled version of Lua.

It’s MIT licensed, and the maintainers are always grateful for bug reports, but all the code in the project was written by just 3 people.

How does it handle garbage collection? AFAIK GC is the main reason behind Lua's stack-based API: it's designed so that C code never needs to hold a pointer to a Lua object, which means an object will never be garbage-collected while C code is still trying to use it.

OTOH Python does allow C code to hold such pointers - so it requires that code to perform error-prone manual reference-counting.

How does Ruby solve this problem?

That was the original claim, but it was quietly removed from the website. (Did they fall for the common “Python is a simple language” misconception?).

Now they promise I can “write like Python”, but don’t even support fundamentals like classes (which are part of stage 3 of the roadmap, but they’re still working on stage 1).

Maybe Mojo will achieve all its goals, but so far has been over-promising and under-delivering - it’s starting to remind me of the V language.

There’s no TV license in New Zealand

But what about those of us who listened to Rich Hickey and prefer "simple" over "easy"? With the executable installer no longer available, how do I get a copy of python.exe, python316.dll etc onto my machine so that `C:\Python316\python.exe