Person interested in programming, languages, culture, and human flourishing.

  • 4 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I think the point is that they don’t want to have to use a full JS framework (which is what HTMX is) for this behavior.

    And this is where HTMX fits in. It’s an elegant and powerful solution to the front-end/back-end split, allowing more of the control logic to operate on the back-end while dynamically loading HTML into their respective places on the front-end.

    But for a tech-luddite like me, this was still a bit too much. All I really want to do is swap page fragments using something like AJAX while sticking to semantically correct HTML.

    EDIT: Put another way, if you look at HTMX’s "motivation"s:

    motivation

    By removing these constraints, htmx completes HTML as a hypertext

    It seems the author only cares about the final bullet, and thinks the first three are reasonable/acceptable limitations.



  • There are several things I disagree with in this article, although I see where the author is coming from. I will never be onboard with “I’ll take my segfaults and buffer overflows.”, and I fundamentally disagree about concurrency. I also think that cargo is fantastic, and a lack of standard build tools is one thing that holds rust’s predecessors back.

    However, a majority of the authors points can be boiled down to “C is more mature”, which doesn’t tell us much about the long-term viability and value of these languages. For example, in the author’s metric of stability and complexity, they use C99 as the baseline, but C99 is the state of a language that had already had almost 3 decades of development, whereas Rust has been stable for less than a decade. Talking about superior portability, stability, and even spec, implementations, and ABI is in some real sense just saying “C is older”.

    That’s not to say those things aren’t valuable, but rather they aren’t immutable characteristics of either language. And given that safety is playing an ever more important role in software, especially systems software, I think Rust will catch up in all the ways that are meaningful for real projects more quickly than most of us realize. I certainly don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon.



  • Ah ok I think I get you now. To be clear, fall through is implicit - when the case being fallen through is empty. I forgot that, if you want to execute some statements in one case, and then go to another case, you need gotos. To be fair, I’ve never needed that behavior before.

    I absolutely see your point on break not being the default. It is sad, although I will say I don’t mind a little extra explicitness in code I’m sharing with a large team.


  • I’m not sure I understand your point about fall through having to be explicit, but I agree that switch statements are lacking ergonomics - which makes some sense considering they were added a looooong time ago. Luckily, they added recently the switch expression, which uses pattern matching and behaves more like Rust’s Match expression. It’s still lacking proper exhuastiveness checks for now, but that’s a problem with the core design of composition in C#’s type model and one they are looking to solve (alongside Discriminate Unions in all likelihood).



  • I certainly see where you’re coming from, but I think the designers of C# have done fairly good job evolving the language to balance backwards compatibility, simplicity (in terms of having “only one way” to do things), and the ergonomics expected of modern languages. I think C++ and JS are great comparisons because C++ has at this point added everything and the kitchen sink to it’s language and standard library, whereas C# has gone much more like JS introducing features that evolve the best practices for writing but still feel and read like essentially the same language. For example, primary constructors still look just like regular C#, it’s just a nicer way to define simple POCOs when desired.

    As far as important language features, I think it’s easy to pick on discriminated unions because it seems like C#’s users unanimously want that. However, if you read through proposals and discussions, it’s obvious that there’s a lot of nuance and trade offs in deciding how and what form of discriminated unions should exist in C# (and the designers are very active in working through that nuance and trade off - they said they have a working group that meets weekly to discuss it I believe*). And to be fair, they have introduced a LOT of other important features (like records and the vastly improved pattern matching) in just the last few years. Without those features, discriminated unions wouldn’t be nearly as appealing, and those features are great for the language even without DUs.

    *Edit: Source for my claim is the recent Languages & Runtime Community Standup on the official dotnet YouTube channel. Mads talks about the working group at 21:05, but the discussion of discriminated unions begins at 7:09.