Go versus Brand X

[Robert Kern]

On 2009-11-23 04:47 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Le Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:36:33 -0600, Robert Kern a écrit :
>>
>> I think there is an overall design sensibility, it's just not a
>> human-facing one. They claim that they designed the syntax to be very
>> easily parsed by very simple tools in order to make things like syntax
>> highlighters very easy and robust. So indentation-based blocks are right
>> out.
>
> But computer languages should be designed to be readable by humans.
> It's not like you need to write a new parser once a year, but you have to
> read code everyday.

You will get no argument from me. My point was only that they had an overall 
design sensibility, not that it was a good one.

> Besides, if you want parsing to be easy, you don't need to make the
> syntax minimal, you just have to provide the parsing routines as part of
> the standard library and/or of an external API.

Not really. The idea was to make the language easily parsed and lexed and 
analyzed by *other* tools, not written in Go, that may have limited 
capabilities. Vim isn't written in Go and won't be able to use their API, for 
example.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco