News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Show HN: Preprocessor I've been working 4 years now. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Preprocessor I've been working 4 years now by lolinder on Sunday July 28, 2024 @10:15AM (#41093311)
"Just" don't do that is easy to say, but it's better to design the language to make it easy to catch mistakes.

The urge to remove delimiters is the lojban impulse [0] applied to programming languages. It's elegant and clean and impractical.

[0] https://mw.lojban.org/index.php

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Preprocessor I've been working 4 years now by throw156754228 on Sunday July 28, 2024 @11:51AM (#41094005)
Read my message again, I'm not saying 'just don't do that'.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Preprocessor I've been working 4 years now by lolinder on Sunday July 28, 2024 @01:51PM (#41094730)
"Just test against visual regressions" sounds to me like "just look twice at the code you indented". Did I misunderstand?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Preprocessor I've been working 4 years now by throw156754228 on Sunday July 28, 2024 @02:32PM (#41095016)
What I mean is this code should be tested like any other, using visual testing suites like playwright or cypress.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Preprocessor I've been working 4 years now by lolinder on Sunday July 28, 2024 @04:24PM (#41095715)
Got it.

My opinion is that if your answer to a deficiency in the language's syntax is to just test harder you're missing something. Quick feedback loops are essential, and the quickest feedback loop at all is having a syntax where it's immediately obvious to the human looking at the code (before analysis is even run!) when there's a problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Preprocessor I've been working 4 years now by throw156754228 on Sunday July 28, 2024 @05:35PM (#41096157)
No not test harder. You should be testing anyway.
[ Parent | on HN ]