PureScript 0.13 Release

90 points by valb 6 years ago | 38 comments

jjnoakes 6 years ago |

I noticed a few languages removing support for octal and binary literals. I wonder why. I find them useful and the parser overhead seems minimal to keep them around.

natefaubion 6 years ago | |

We found no usages of it in the wild. If there is real-world need for them, we'll consider adding them back.

scrollaway 6 years ago | | |

FWIW I use binary literals a bunch in python, either when working with binary file formats or with bitfields.

ergothus 6 years ago | |

Generally developers tend to either (1) misunderstand them when they encounter them in the wild or (2) accidentally invoke them. (I believe multiple languages have had issues with '04' being treated as an octal, which works fine and doesn't trigger developer notice until they encounter '09' in the wild).

Whether these are VALID concerns I won't take a stance on - just saying these are the reasons I've seen cited.

wtetzner 6 years ago | | |

Why not use 0x,0b, and 0o for hex, binary, and octal literals? I never liked the fact that a number starting with 0 was treated as octal.

wtetzner 6 years ago | |

Yeah, it never made sense to me not to include those, given how simple it is.

marquis-chacha 6 years ago | | |

The typical octal literal syntax I've seen uses a 0 prefix. This gives rise to quite a few gotchas, as most people think of leading 0's as being non-value-changing. Maybe 0o12345670?

dmitryminkovsky 6 years ago |

Are there other languages that make an opinion on tabs/spaces? This seems nice.

> The only whitespace now allowed in code is ASCII space and line endings. Since you must use indentation to format PureScript code (unlike Haskell), we felt it was best to be more restrictive in what you can write instead of allowing potentially confusing behavior (implicit tab-width, zero-width spaces, etc). You can still use unicode whitespace within string literals.

I’m also wondering about the removed literals.

McWobbleston 6 years ago | |

F# doesn't allow tabs unless you use a compiler directive

earenndil 6 years ago | |

Zig doesn't allow tabs in source code—which is a bit odd, since they don't have significant whitespace.

nathanyukai 6 years ago | |

I think Elm have similar rules, the official code format tool is very opinionated.

entropic 6 years ago | | |

I can attest to that, elm-format is an excellent tool and it is great to have a standard code formatter, one less thing to worry or argue over when writing code!

truth_seeker 6 years ago |

If PureScript is Haskell, TypeScript is ML

Lately, TypeScript has become more scalable across existing npm libraries and also introduced new advanced types. It looks like Microsoft guys learned a lot from C# and F# type system and feedback from their users

https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced-types....

Scarbutt 6 years ago |

What happened to the original author of PS?

https://github.com/purescript/purescript/graphs/contributors

kepano 6 years ago | |

I don't speak for Phil, but I do work with him at Lumi where we use PureScript for almost all frontend. It's been really fun to show that PureScript can be used successfully in production.

You can see some of our tutorials and open source projects here: https://www.lumi.dev

gb 6 years ago | |

Life! :)

He still uses PS and chimes in on some issues, but doesn't really have time to work on the compiler anymore: https://twitter.com/paf31/status/941745900426215424

dwhitney 6 years ago | |

Like many of us, he had children and couldn't keep up with the workload, so he took a step back. Fortunately there is a very active community working on PureScript!

asplake 6 years ago |

Syntax question, after looking at a couple of examples: Long wished more languages had a ‘where’ clause (suspect it could be really nice to have in Python), but why the ‘where’ at the end of the initial ‘module’ line? I guess it’s doing something consistent, but it does look a bit odd

natefaubion 6 years ago | |

It's something that comes from Haskell. The `where` keyword always starts a new layout/indentation context. It's not strictly necessary and there are ways around it, so it's just a point of consistency.

jaequery 6 years ago |

what is scary about all these TypeScript, PureScript, Elm, etc, is that for variety of reasons, any one of these can just come and go. coffeescript anyone?

i'd tread very carefully and wisely before choosing any one of these paths.

it only makes sense imo if you come from Haskell, Clojure, or some other ML background to have an explicit interest in these languages.

iLemming 6 years ago | |

Coffeescript did not offer anything but different syntax. It hasn't improved the semantics of the language. Some people liked it and some didn't.

Elm, PureScript, and Clojurescript are fundamentally different languages. Javascript today has bloated, and it keeps growing. Experienced developers tend to dislike it. Newbie developers struggle with it. It is no longer "a small language with a low entry barrier". ECMAScript specification is already bigger than Java's.

PLs of today and the next couple of decades will be striving for optimizing for programmer's productivity, performance, or correctness of the program. Javascript today does not fit in any of these categories. So it is only natural - the trend of using alt-js langs will only grow.

recursive 6 years ago | |

Typescript is essentially just javascript with types. The compiler just checks and then takes the types out. So with typescript, if you need to migrate away, you just take your compiler output, and ditch your .ts files. The output is generally just as readable as the input.