I don't think that Pony is claiming to be novel in the area of syntax?
As far as I can tell reading here, “reference capabilities” don’t do anything that properly-used C semaphores haven’t done for near half a century. Or that their abstraction of that isn’t nicer to use than, say, Elixir’s, or better than Rust’s borrow checker for managing mutability. A code example could convince me otherwise.
Show us code that uses “reference capabilities” to do something. This “the syntax doesn’t matter” talk just comes off as bullshit to devs wanting to actually use a language. It would be better to commit to a syntax, post some damn examples on the site, and let devs get used to “reference capabilities.” If the syntax needs revising, just do that in Pony v2.
If you want devs to be enthusiastic about your language, make it easy for them to understand why they should be enthusiastic. That means code, front and center, first thing.
Also the syntax is great, probably my favourite language ever syntactically. Dunno why there's a pointless argument about it in these comments...
The reference capabilities are fairly novel as well. Apart from the lack of tooling, writing in Pony is great.
I've been looking for platforms where one can maybe more formally encode their thoughts, so that the argumentation and debating skill barrier is lowered / eliminated, along with manipulation. And I did find some, but they don't quite hit the spot, and even if they did, people aren't really on them, so it doesn't matter sadly.
P.S. "please do flag and downvote rather."
I don't have that capability, else I would certainly use it.
"Surely you can appreciate that their comment was not written in agreement with or support for you"
No, I disagree; I think that is exactly what it was--the subject of the comment was your comment, not mine--you wrote of my statement as being a universal truth, not v.v.
Unsurprisingly, on every point where you and I disagree, I think that I am right and you are wrong.
I think it is best that, from now on, neither of us speak to or about each other.
Edit:
> No, I disagree;
Sure, costs me nothing to take your word for it. Definitely came across like that to me though, so if that was not intentional, maybe it's something for your later consideration.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728708
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722043
It's laudable to want work like Pony to get discussed in terms of the most interesting things about it, but the best way to do this is to describe and explain more of what's interesting. It's not helpful to comment about how bad other comments are, and certainly not to cross into attack. Those things feed flamewars, as unfortunately happened badly in this thread. That's what we're most trying to avoid.
As for Pony, I'm not here to defend it or explain it ... I simply responded to casual dismissals of it on trivial grounds.
> I can't flag that outrageous personal attack and no one else has.
Why wouldn't you be able to flag it? And there's no flagged counter, it's not possible for ordinary users to tell how many times a post has been flagged or not.
I think there is a fundamental gap in communication. Your actual point is not coming across at all, anywhere in this thread.
That's why you're getting downvoted.
"For Pony in particular, the syntax is not important ... it's simply not the point of the language."
You said that in direct response to someone who was wanting to see the syntax. While I do appreciate that it's not strictly speaking necessary in the context of your reply, it doesn't communicate at all why syntax isn't important to the pony language. You're just making a definitive statement unsupported by anything. Context or even a brief explanation would have been extremely helpful and almost certainly avoided all of this fuss. Your response, given without any context as to why syntax isn't important for pony, was actually harmful, rather than useful.
Syntax is probably one of the single most important things in any language. It matters for writing, but especially for reading.
Bad syntax leads to all kinds of implementation mistakes. It comes with footguns primed ready to go off, probably at the worst possible time. Bad syntax can also make it hard to re-read code and understand what it's doing (especially if the language leans heavily on "magic"), leading to difficulties when troubleshooting, or difficulties when extending existing code.
The more developers you have involved in any project, the more important good syntax becomes, because you all have to be able to read and understand each other's code, and know precisely what is happening. A lot of the bugs that end up in production tend to stem from some disconnect in understanding of the interactions between sections of code.
That appears to be your position (and maybe even that of a majority of developers), but it apparently isn't the position of the Pony developers. If you have a language in which you can mathematically reason about code (which Pony claims very prominently), then surface concerns such as syntax seem to matter less.
It's a different design goal and it feels like many people in the comments here don't appreciate that.
Aside from this being argumentum ad populum, my upvotes and some of the other comments say otherwise. And I find comments like yours full of strawmen and taking things out of context, to the point where it's simply not worthwhile to debate the substantive points.
Although, I would point out that while your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable (the fact that syntax can make the difference between a very good language and an unusable one), whitespace and malbolge also have terrible semantics that contribute to them being unusable.
As a former Lisp enthusiast (and still an enjoyer), I'd actually use my own darling as an example: Lisps have amazing semantics and are generally good languages. Their syntax is highly regular and structured and easy to parse...except that it's brain-hostile, and I'm convinced that it actively makes it harder to read and write - not just adopt, but actually use.
Are you talking about natural languages here? The so called Sapir Whorf thesis - in its strong or weak form - is rather controversial. There are some interesting findings, but the interpretation of them is still hotly debated.
In any case, none of the studies that I've seen (e.g. about colour perception, spatial reasoning, etc.) seem to be about syntax. I'd have to see some evidence that head-marking language speaker somehow think differently than dependent-marking language speakers and I haven't seen that.
> your argument ad absurdum is generally reasonable
it's a valid argument when somebody is speaking in absolutes, but I haven't seen GGP do that. There's a difference between saying "all syntax is completely arbitrary" and "syntax is not the point" - the latter suggests to me that if you stay within certain reasonable bounds (e.g. not be whitespace or malbolge), whether you use significant whitespace of braces, the language looks more like Pascal or like C, etc. are of minor importance in the grand scheme of things. Which is something you may disagree with, but it's a much more reasonable point that anything you can just counter with "but whitspace!".
I never said anything to the contrary. I specifically stated that syntax was not an important consideration in the design of Pony language. That does not imply the numerous strawmen that you and others attacked here. As Tainnor correctly and honestly noted:
"it's a valid argument when somebody is speaking in absolutes, but I haven't seen GGP do that. There's a difference between saying "all syntax is completely arbitrary" and "syntax is not the point" - the latter suggests to me that if you stay within certain reasonable bounds (e.g. not be whitespace or malbolge), whether you use significant whitespace of braces, the language looks more like Pascal or like C, etc. are of minor importance in the grand scheme of things. Which is something you may disagree with, but it's a much more reasonable point that anything you can just counter with "but whitspace!"."
True, it just means that it's idiotic, rather.
And so no,
> Saying that a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge is very different from saying that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.
I categorically disagree that these would be meaningfully distinct claims, as the "[only] a certain kind of Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge" bit specifically invokes the implicit disqualification of said Scotsman from being counted as a True Scotsman.
> not the only example of it from that source
Pretty ironic of you to say that.
[0] the literal definition of the no true scotsman fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Whereas this follows the form more of "Murder is bad" "I dunno, a lot of Scotsmen commit murder" "Ok, but no true Scotsman would commit murder"
It's the same (annoying) assertion, but the fundamental argument is about the value of murder, not the category of "Scotsmen," so it's not the same extremely obvious fallacy of redefining the literal topic at hand whenever a counterexample is presented.
It's why I called it an outright textbook example: it's an appeal to purity, where purity is determined in a circular way - the very definition of the no true scotsman fallacy, as far as I could find and understand it.
I agree for the hello world but I disagree with the syntax. It is the first thing you see and the characteristic you can never escape. It is like the layout and typesetting of a text: the substance is of course more important, but it is still very important. I personally find much more readable languages that have a concise-but-not-too-much syntax, that use not too many special characters, and that is read like fortran/pascal/c/etc (I don't how to define it, but for example lisp is different)