Babel 7.5 - Hackdot

Re:Babel 7.5 by omegaworks on Sunday July 07, 2019 @03:37PM (#20377269)

How does it read in your internal monologue? "await pound" doesn't convey a whole lot of semantic meaning to me.

I'm curious how others read it.

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Re:Babel 7.5 by adrusi on Sunday July 07, 2019 @04:12PM (#20377508)

Perl programmers read "$_" as "it".

So you could read the expression above as "fetch url, then await it, then get its json then await it, then get its ID"

Although I don't know why a syntax needs to be verbally legible, seems like an odd requirement to me.

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Re:Babel 7.5 by omegaworks on Sunday July 07, 2019 @09:02PM (#20379124)

There's a reason why Pearl is considered a write-only language.

Programming languages typically opt for either verbal legibility or having their symbols represent some understood structural / visual cue (like an arrow, for example). There's nothing about the character "#" that indicates the directionality of the operation visually, so I assumed there was some verbal mapping that I wasn't familiar with. ("Hash", "pound", "number", etc).

Typically programming languages are used to communicate procedures in ways that would allow human people with a similar set of cultural references to understand what is going on by reading it. Having verbal legibility allows people who know the language to explain very quickly to new people what is meant by a given symbol. Otherwise why #? It could be any symbol.

Communicating meaning for humans might not be the intent for javascript moving forward, given where WASM and transpilation is headed, so :shrug:

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