The linked page is pretty self explanatory. It’s TS with some extra features, many of which are already proposals for the language. Cool for an experiment, not good for a maintained codebase.
That’s part of what C does, but it’s not the only thing.
Assembly adds mnemonics and a logical structure to machine code.
C largely does the same, but adds a cross-platform abstraction, mechanisms for organizing and sharing source code, a standard library, and various other things.
Syntactic sugar is such a broad and vague term that those features you mentioned could also technically be considered syntactic sugar. Instead of having to write harder longer code you can write easier and less code.
I think we can understand syntactic sugar as an alternative (hopefully more convenient, elegant, or pleasing) syntax for expressing something that can already be expressed.
That is, something that works the same but looks better (hopefully).
A cross-CPU abstraction, a preprocessor, a standard library all have certain elements of syntax in them, but go well beyond alternative syntax.
That looks interesting but imo the syntax is too terse. Coming from Rust and Golang I very much appreciate the use of sigils and syntax sugar in moderation but especially the pipe operators look like they could lead to hard to debug code very easily.
The pipe operator just flips the order of execution. In my experience this doesn't really impact debugging at all.
without the pipe operator you would write ` fun1(fun2(fun3(fun4(fun5(x, y), z, w), u), v)) `
The order of operations in this line is actually from right to left. Also it's not immediately obvious to which function the u parameter belongs to.
With the pipe operate you would write it in the order that the functions are actually called and you have the arguments in the same location as the function they belong to.
So this would be written something like
I wrote a bunch of CoffeeScript back in the day, and everyone I've spoken to about it feels the same, that it was a bad idea in hindsight, and a language dead end. The language was only syntactic sugar, and by not bringing anything else to the table, was unconvincing for ports and support in other ecosystems. It now seems that most codebases have been decaffeinated though.
Civet looks like it adds a little more, but the things that aren't just syntactic sugar are just a grab bag of TC39 proposals. I'm a big fan of language proposals in general, and having a language that adds all of them for research purposes seems like a nice thing to have. Haskell did this well with GHC language options. Is this a research language though? It seems not.
What's the benefit over Typescript? A few less characters? Faster TC39 proposal integrations? What happens if a proposal is rejected, does it get removed from Civet? What's the cost? What happens as Typescript and Civet diverge? What if the TS tooling doesn't support Civet features?
I think everyone mostly agrees that CoffeeScript was a dead end, but I think it drove at lot of innovation at the time. Hopefully Civet can do the same, even if it ends up being another dead end.
CoffeScript was really good at driving innovation in JavaScript. The arrow operator, string literals, and for...in/for...of seemed to be driven specifically from CoffeeScript's innovations.
Almost all of these were features of other mainstream PLs at the time, so it's questionable whether JS really borrowed them from CS or directly from those others. Especially since the latter is clearly true for some other features such as async/await.
Considering it's not just a grab-bag of TC39 proposals (e.g. removing braces), I suspect rejected TC39 proposals will just... linger.
I agree a research language feels potentially useful — and in fact that's what CoffeeScript's real legacy is (arrow functions, splats, destructuring assignments, and ES6 classes among others are direct ports of CoffeeScript syntax features, and many of the original JS class proposals that CoffeeScript-style classes replaced were quite bad) — but I'd be similarly leery of using this to ship much.
> I wrote a bunch of CoffeeScript back in the day, and everyone I've spoken to about it feels the same, that it was a bad idea in hindsight
I don't think it was a bad idea in hindsight.
JS of the era was a pain to use; CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier, which is the reason it took off. Since then things changed and many "CoffeeScript features" are now "JavaScript features". Only with knowledge of that future would it be a "bad idea", but it was absolutely not clear that was going to happen back in 2010 and in alternative universes we're all writing CoffeeScript today.
I also think CoffeeScript was probably helpful in getting some of these features adopted in the first place.
The same applies to TypeScript – maybe typing will be added to JavaScript, and TypeScript will become redundant – I think there was some proposal and who knows what will happen. In 15 years we can say the same about TypeScript, but that doesn't mean TypeScript wasn't useful today, with the current state of JavaScript and uncertainty what the future may or may not bring.
> CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier
My point is that it kinda didn't. It looked prettier on the surface, but didn't actually solve any of the deeper problems of writing JavaScript. To write CoffeeScript you had to still know JavaScript and all its oddities.
TypeScript solved those problems, and that's why it has taken off and had a meteoric rise to the point that it's practically synonymous with JavaScript.
> I also think CoffeeScript was probably helpful in getting some of these features adopted in the first place.
This may be true, but if so that suggests a benefit as a research language not a production language.
Coffeescript had some great features: classes, array comprehensions, default parameter values, arrow functions, optional chaining. Many of these eventually made it to ecmascript.
And then it ruined us with implicit returns, optional parentheses and brackets, and the isnt vs is not fiasco.
I worked a lot with Python and coffeescript at the same time back in the day. In Python you mess up your whitespace and 95% of the time it's an indentation error. In coffeescript it's a valid program that means something completely different than what you intended. Combined with the optional punctuation, which the community encouraged leaning into, it was far too easy to write ambiguous code that you and the compiler would come to different interpretations of.
In case you wondered how Civet compared to CoffeeScript in these regards:
* `is not` is the textual equivalent of `!==`. You can use `isnt` if you turn on the feature explicitly (or even the weird CoffeeScript `is not` behavior if you want it, mainly for legacy code)
* Implicit returns are turned on by default. They are really useful, most of the time, and don't get in the way much if you use `void` return annotations (which turns them off). But if you don't like them, you can turn them off globally with a compiler flag.
* Civet's compiler is built on very different technology from CoffeeScript's (PEG parsing, similar to Python), and it is much more strict about indentation. None of those weird bugs anymore.
* We do have implicit parentheses and braces and such, but you're free to use explicit parentheses and braces as you like. We encourage people to rename their .ts files into .civet (which mostly just works without any converison) and just embrace the features/syntax they like.
> but you're free to use explicit parentheses and braces as you like
I’ve been eying Civet and I quite like it so far, but I dislike having this option because it means I’ll have to see it in other peoples code. I prefer strict rules for readability.
Oh man, that brings memories. When I joined a coffee-shop (pun intended), and learnt about implicit returns, I was screaming internally until we got rid of all the coffee (which was massive long team-wide migration effort that took like 2y to finish).
Once the migration was finished, everyone was so tired, that at the mere proposal of using TypeScript instead of JS the whole team would just roll their eyes and silently say "nope" in terror. Which was a shame, because large JS codebases are difficult to maintain and explore.
In Ruby and Elixir, it is implicit returns. That's always been like that, and people working with those languages don't have a problem with it. When I started writing Typescript, I was screaming internally at the explicit returns.
So I think this has more to do with how people are used to thinking with the languages they are fluent in.
What was so ruinous about implicit returns? That's one of the things I missed most when leaving CoffeeScript. ECMAScript only partially adopted it (single statement fat arrow functions) which probably muddies the waters for people trying to learn and understand the language's behavior.
Since it's optional for the caller to use or assign the return value of a function, I don't see much problem with functions defaulting to returning something. Maybe it just fits with my personal preference of functions returning a value and not having side-effects..
probably gets better with use but having to remember not to put a loop as the last statement of a function, because it would make it return an array of the last statement of the loop body, caught me off guard enough times to get annoying.
easy enough to add an extra line with just 'undefined' as the last statement of the function of course. but then you do need to remember that.
TypeScript even took off after the earth had been salted by CoffeeScript. Many people were sceptical about TypeScript because they assumed it was as big of a buy-in as CoffeeScript - rather than it just being JS with some (mostly) strictly-additive syntax, that you would have been able to strip out without risk had TS never taken off.
It didn't solve the deeper problems, no, but it also didn't error out when you accidentally had a trailing comma in your object, -> and => made dealing with "this" less painful (no more "var that = this"), and stuff like that.
Convenience does matter. The less I have to think about nonsense like that, the more I can think about actually writing correct code.
CoffeeScript wasn't perfect in that sense either and had some nonsense of its own. That probably contributed to its demise as much as any thing else.
Regardless of one's opinion on duck typing, Javascript was like feeling out for ducks with your hands in the dark, typescript was like being able to see for the first time.
My biggest gripe with CoffeeScript, beyond it's scoping being madness [1], is it made writing very inefficient JavaScript much easier. The language was full of footguns.
Many times something would look perfectly reasonable in CoffeeScript but when you would actually read the JS it would be iterating the same dataset multiple times to grab individual items that could have and should have been a single loop.
It's the Hibernate problem all over again. Any time one language is layered on another, the user is totally unaware of the degenerate cases that they are triggering, and the higher language is usually blocked from fixing those. Similar to C++ preprocessors which generated poor C.
> TypeScript solved those problems, and that's why it has taken off and had a meteoric rise to the point that it's practically synonymous with JavaScript.
It's also backed – nay, pushed – by one of the largest and most successful tech companies in the world. A company that also made a point of releasing a very capable IDE to go along with it. Surely this has had some impact on its meteoric rise? :o)
> JS of the era was a pain to use; CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier
It didn't. Anything you learn / are familiar with will be easier to write - Coffescript was easier to write for people who learned Coffescript. Which in hindsight wasn't time well spent as they would've eventually had to bite the bullet anyway & just learn JavaScript like everyone else.
JavaScript is much much easier to write and read for a person who has chosen to learn JavaScript & has not had the occasion to learn Coffescript (i.e. most people) so you were also doing others a disservice if readability was one of your goals.
> which is the reason it took off
The reason it took off was the Ruby was going through a popularity trend & Rails devs wanted to work in a front-end language that felt syntactically familiar. It was purely aesthetic.
Around 2012, I had sunk several years into becoming extremely familiar with JavaScript when I switched onto a team which was using CoffeeScript. I immediately liked it: it addressed some of the things I'd always found irritating about JavaScript, and I found it very easy to pick up. I was not a Ruby or even Python user at that time, so that didn't influence my decision either.
But you're right that you did have to know enough JS to understand what CoffeeScript was doing under the hood when things went wrong.
Outside of arrow functions, I don't really think CoffeeScript had a single important idea. And even then, the aversion to the `function` keyword in the JavaScript community never fails to make me laugh. Sure, sometimes the implicit scoping of the arrow function is nice, but man.
CoffeeScript was not only a great idea but also successful beyond its adoption. It influenced and inspired many features that JavaScript later incorporated, such as arrow functions and destructuring assignments.
Over time, JavaScript evolved to the point where the few quality of life improvements offered by CoffeeScript no longer justified learning an entirely new syntax.
I sometimes wonder if Kotlin will end up on the same trajectory. Java has added a lot of pretty good features since Kotlin first came on the scene, and the gap has narrowed considerably. The one thing enormous thing that Kotlin has that cannot be replicated easily in Java is null safety. But lately, most of the other features in Kotlin either make me long for something more powerful like Scala or shrug and just fall back to Java.
Admittedly, I don't do much Android development, and that was a big driver of Kotlin's adoption early on. So maybe it has more of a foothold there than on the server.
It will, because that is the fate of every guest language since the dawn of times.
The "systems" language of the platform, evolves with the platform, is designed alongside the platform.
The guest languages might be better than the platform's "systems" language, on the day of the release, eventually it is bound to diverge with its own library ecosystem built on top (because "ugh" we're not using the platform libraries directly), its own IDE tooling, its additional debugging layer due to platform interop, its own abstractions not native to the platform,.....
Eventually it naturally diverges as the platform takes incompatible decisions,...
C and C++ on UNIX, JavaScript and anything compiles to JS, Java vs Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Kotlin/jTCL/Beanshell/jython/...., C# vs VB.NET/F#/C++/CLI/IronPython/IronRuby,...
The guest languages that are survive, are those that move beyond the platform that gave them birth and create a platform of their own.
In Kotlin's case that is definitely Android, because Android team is doing everything at their disposal to make Java a 2nd class language on Android, rewriting Jetpack libraries in Kotlin, requiring Kotlin for Compose, showing off Kotlin code samples against Java 8 examples(!), I bet they only starting updating Java support, because Android was starting to lose too many Java libraries as the Java ecosystem adopts new versions.
Still, Android 15 being released one year later from Java 21 LTS, is still catching up with Java 17 LTS, introduced in Android 13 and not yet fully implemented, kind of proves the point of them not being in a hurry for proper Java support on the platform.
And beyond this, there’s very much a world where a few key people don’t discover Jeremy Ashkenas’ work - much of which, between CoffeeScript and Backbone, was the excitement that you could make JS feel agile - at the right time in their careers to push the industry in the direction where frontend developers become frontend engineers. We owe so much to these stepping stones.
Well, yeah that was expressly known about CoffeeScript. It pushed JS to the future and was expected to be not useful whenever JS gained more features, but that would take a long time. And some of the syntax features weren't adopted, which meant CoffeeScript seems like a different thing from JS but it wasn't intended to be a departure or permanent.
But JS moved faster and babel was made and eventually we could use JS-future even when browsers hadn't updated yet and CoffeeScript wasn't needed. But it was pretty easy to translate it to JS, commit that and keep rolling. CS was great at the time.
One of the Civet devs here. To me, the main benefit of Civet is the ability to rapidly add useful features to the language, while preserving all the benefits of TS (tooling, etc.). We're constantly coming up with ideas — from TC39 proposals, other languages, or general brainstorming — and implementing them quickly. For example, we recently added pattern matching when catching exceptions, which took just a couple of hours of development; or Python-style from ... import ... for better autocompletion of imports. All of these features are optional; you can write well-formed TypeScript as usual, and just choose to use the features you think are worth the learning curve for readers. The plugins for VSCode, Vite, esbuild, Webpack, eslint, etc. aren't perfect, but they let Civet code enjoy most of the tooling out there.
I personally use Civet for all my coding projects, as I'm devoted to it continuing to flourish. But if you ever don't like what Civet is offering you, you can eject at any time by replacing your code with the TypeScript compilation, which we make as close as we can to your input.
What happens if a TC39 proposal is rejected? That's actually the good case for us, because it means we can keep the feature as is. Civet already transpiles all features to TypeScript, so they can live here forever if we think they're good. The trickier part is when Java/TypeScript changes in a way that's incompatible with Civet. Then we plan to change Civet to match Java/TypeScript, so that we don't diverge (though compiler flags allow us to also support the older form with explicit opt-in if we think it's worth doing so).
JavaScript and TypeScript move slow. Largely that's a good thing; they're a stable foundation, and we don't want to mess them up. But it's also exciting to be on the bleeding edge, explore new ideas, and obtain new features as quickly as we can design them, instead of waiting a decade. Many features are also too niche / add to much complexity for the general JavaScript language, but they're still fair game for languages that transpile to JavaScript. See also the recent JS0 vs. JSSugar discussion.
I think you need to drop or at least weaken an inspiration from CoffeeScript if that's a goal, otherwise everyone will immediately draw a connection to that and overlook any other aspect of Civet. (I personally hate CoffeeScript especially for its indentation and that contributed to my initial reaction.) You can't solve this problem with simply supporting two radically different coding styles---the front page seems to prefer one over another anyway.
I love getting rid of visual noise of brackets around code blocks. It's as silly debate as tabs vs spaces. It should be a text editor setting if you prefer to see them or hide and see just indents instead.
It's fun and valuable to have a place to land proposals and try them out early (seems like TS itself should have flags for this though). The problem is that as the proposal is refined, or if it is rejected, it implies constant changes to your language, which will basically drive away anyone who's not experimenting around for fun in the same mindset as you. Could be good or bad, although managing the flux might be tricky even so.
The addition of quick things you whipped up in a couple of hours seems like it'll make the rate of changes impossible to handle. It's unlikely almost by definition that the change you whipped up quickly will stand the test of repeated use and further experience unmodified.
All that said, it's a super fun thing to do, and hats off for such an ambitious project. If nothing else, writing a parser, transpiler, etc. is impressive and fun work, and will undoubtedly enable/force you to learn all the javascript/TS quirks and details extremely well! :-)
CoffeeScript was great except for a few fatal mistakes. The biggest was implicit variable declarations, which meant that to write maintainable code, you had to reintroduce explicit declarations via iifes. Otherwise, you’d risk a future code change introducing shadowing which would have consequences that were super painful to debug.
The other big one, which unfortunately Civet seems to be doing too, is implicit return combined with “everything is an expression”. You can have one of those, but not both. With both, it’s far too easy to write loops intended to be statements, and which accidentally turn into gigantic multi-dimensional array returns which can’t easily be optimized out by the compiler. Fortunately, this would be only mildly inconvenient to work around with a lint rule that forces explicit return in all functions.
You can also turn off implicit returns in Civet if you don't like them. They also work well with TypeScript annotations: if you annotate a return value of `void`, then there's no implicit return.
I agree it can be easy to make and throw away big arrays if you're not aware of what's going on. But it can also save a lot of time. For loops as arrays are super useful, integrating the equivalent of "map" into the language itself. We also recently added generator versions (for*). JSX is a nice example where for loops as expressions and implicit return are powerful; see e.g. https://civet.dev/reference#code-children
What might work well is a lint rule to error if a loop expression ends an actual function declaration (i.e. not an inline callback), and the function doesn’t explicitly define a return type. I think that catches almost every bad case, aside from the odd memory leak in really unusual edge cases.
You can have shadowing with explicitly declared variables. And there are languages that allow that, Rust to name one and I love that I can do that every time I use it.
I slightly misspoke. The issue was that you wanted shadowing, but because of the lack of declarations, some random inner variable could suddenly reference a variable with broader scope.
For example, you might have an “x” in some inner loop within a function. Then later on, you’d add an “x” earlier in the function, not realizing that that name was used down below. Suddenly the inner loop is referencing that new variable, and there was no way to tell other than the surprising ways your code would suddenly malfunction.
> implicit return combined with “everything is an expression”. You can have one of those, but not both.
Hang on, how can you have “everything is an expression” without implicit return? If I’m correctly understanding what you’re talking about, implicit return isn’t actually a thing—it’s just that the function body is an expression too.
(Never dealt with CoffeeScript, but I’ve been writing Rust for over a decade now, and learned to love expression-orientation there.)
You do it by making sequential evaluation (i.e. the semicolon, which becomes an operator in "everything is an expression" world) always produce a void result. Then you introduce the notion of terminating evaluation early and yielding a value from the compound expression - this becomes `return` (and other similar constructs like `break` and `continue`).
That's a really mean / uncharitable take. As others have pointed out, coffeescript did a great job of moving the language in a good direction, and that's presumably exactly what's intended here.
Something interesting I've found while designing Civet is that TypeScript actually mitigates in a lot of the downsides of CoffeeScript.
Types help quite a bit with implicit returns so you don't accidentally return an iteration results array from a void function.
They also help reduce the downsides of terse syntax, just hover over things in the IDE and see what they are. Missed a step in a pipeline? The IDE will warn you if there's a mismatch.
I still use CS for prototyping. It's easy to write and what's most important it's easy to read due to lack of visual clutter of JS. Once I have something decent I just take JS output and annotate it with types and work on it further debugging and optimizing.
> What's the benefit over Typescript? A few less characters? Faster TC39 proposal integrations?
Getting hands on experience with those proposals could be an argument, learning how they feel, learning how their availability changes the way people write code. Could this be called a research language? Sure, but that categorization would certainly influence the outcome of the observation.
I'm not disagreeing with any of your points though. Perhaps some mitigation could be provided by making their equivalent of decaffeinization a true first class citizen, intended to be run whenever a proposal gets rejected (or implicitly rejected by the language taking a different direction). This would have to be fine grained, and the language/tool would have to make "rolling preview of whatever proposals are currently in consideration" the code of its identity, not any particular set of language features.
CoffeeScript was amazing. It was only a dead-end because flow and subsequently typescript made an offer the ecosystem couldn't refuse. Unfortunately, I doubt that Civet will have much future momentum because even though typescript is the state of the art for front-end dev, it's a much less stable foundation to build on top of than ES was for CoffeeScript.
We're definitely looking for ways to improve ways to specify types! I think destructured typing [https://civet.dev/reference#destructured-typing] is already quite useful, especially for React. On the readability side, if/then/else [https://civet.dev/reference#conditional-types] seems easier to read than ?: ternaries, and "Partial Record Name, Info" seems easier to read than "Partial<Record<Name, Info>>" (implicit type arguments — https://civet.dev/reference#implicit-type-arguments). But we'd love to hear more ideas for features like branded types. Join us in Discord if you're interested!
Languages like this don't make sense anymore. You can just pick a mature, feature-rich language you like (Rust, Kotlin, Python, probably many more) and transpile to JS.
The built in browser debugger is incredibly good. As long as the transpilation is simple and matches JS semantics you can still use the debugger. I haven't seen good debugging tools when using languages more distant from JS but I'd love to know if they've become viable.
You've been able to debug TypeScript (and anything else that transpiles to JS) natively in the browser for years using sourcemaps. That includes Dart, C#/F#, Go (as far as I know), and Python.
For the languages that target wasm instead, there are different debugging stories. Kotlin's is very good, Rust's is pretty immature.
Source maps are not sufficient to fully expose the semantics of the language being debugged to the debugger. You also need the expression evaluator (for stuff like Watch etc) to understand what it's debugging. And in cases where transpilation includes nontrivial mapping of data structures, you also need the ability to do that mapping in reverse to display the values.
Source maps work great for TS because it is just "JavaScript with types" at this point.
That’s certainly not true of Rust: Rust had a particular goal, easily recognised as worthwhile, which wasn’t possible with any existing languages. Everyone sensible agreed the language made a lot of sense, even if they weren’t sold on the practicality of its specific approach.
I didn’t get involved with any of this stuff until mid-2013, but at the very least by then, it was well understood that Servo couldn’t reach its potential without Rust.
> Rust began as a personal project in 2006 by Mozilla Research employee Graydon Hoare, named after the group of fungi that are "over-engineered for survival". Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009, and would employ a dozen engineers to work on it full time over the next ten years
So by 2013 it was already 7 years old. I very much doubt the original personal project was viewed as "a lot of sense" etc.
You’ll always easily find plenty of people that will say “that makes no sense”. But of people that worked in these sorts of fields, I imagine that, from the very start, there would have been significantly more than average approval for its goals, even if you wouldn’t expect it to succeed (such endeavours normally don’t). The niche Rust was targeting from the very beginning was one that was known to be underserved, and known to be rather important.
That approach only makes any sense if you have broadly compatible semantics; otherwise execution will pay a heavy penalty (CPU usage, memory usage, bundle size). And let me tell you, your “Rust, Kotlin, Python, probably many more” don’t transpile to JS well. If you genuinely mean transpiling as distinct from compiling, I think you could even reasonably say that it’s simply not possible for many languages due to fundamental and incompatible differences. I’d count Rust as that due to things like resolution and aliasing.
If you’re interested in targeting JavaScript, languages like this are your only reasonable alternative to JavaScript itself. (If you’re interested in targeting the web more generally, WebAssembly is a better target.)
I should have referenced compiling to Wasm as well, which is what languages with very different semantics to JS (like Rust, the CLR family, and the JVM family) all do.
If you do mean more generically targeting the web, then I recommend avoiding the word “transpile”, which will be understood to be something far more restricted in scope.
Working with WASM isn’t really that good for interactive pages with dynamic DOM.
If you don’t mind I guess you could just render to a canvas but then you lose a ton of functionality provided by the browser. (Eg: making a responsive page in WASM seems hard)
It seems to me for most web applications JS is the only real alternative as of now
> Working with WASM isn’t really that good for interactive pages with dynamic DOM.
It’s completely fine. At present you’ll need to trampoline via JS to make the actual DOM calls, but that’s not typically a performance bottleneck; and such bindings can give you exactly the same API, if you choose.
Yes, work is just about done in browsers for giving you direct access to these things without the JS trampolining, and lots of people are hanging out for that to be dependable, but in practical terms it changes nothing. Nothing. No change in expressiveness; it only gets you probably slightly better performance, and a simpler technique for binding (which is typically immaterial for end users, as libraries were handling that for them).
The motivation is giving people a chance to try these features and thus ultimately helping move the language in a good direction. That's what coffeescript did also.
Civet has so many quality of life improvements! It's good that it exists sort of as a playground for ideas that could maybe in the future be adopted by JS itself, kinda like how it went with CoffeeScript.
It appears to prioritize easier and faster typing over readability, which is a poor choice as programmers spend more time reading rather than writing code.
Having worked in Rust I love the pattern matching proposal. Having dabbled in Swift I like the single argument function part (though keep the brackets, please)
Much of the rest I could take or leave… but then is that just because I’m not familiar with them? Stuff like the pipe operator makes sense to me but it reminds me of .reduce(): there are a few legitimate uses of it but the vast majority will be entirely-too-smart—for-its-own-good show off coding.
I feel like there is a specific kind of person that likes all this, and there is very little overlap between those people and the people that choose to use Typescript.
Kinda feels like someone was forced to work in Typescript and really wanted to scratch their own itch.
I must be a very specific kind of person. I love TypeScript, and loved CoffeeScript even more. I’m baffled by many of the comments here and excited to try Civet.
Civet reminds me of Coffeescript but now in TypeScript.
This has made me even more convinced that the future of JavaScript is JavaScript.
We will be seeing JavaScript (natively) having all the types, features and proposals that TypeScript has and the industry will eventually move on from TypeScript.
I feel like typescript would officially deprecate itself if that ever happened. But I also feel like that won't ever happen. It would be cool if ES would get optional type annotations or something, even if they were ignored at runtime. But someone would still want a static type checker. TS does that, and if there's nothing to replace that part, then TS still has a viable mission statement.
The JSX seems compelling. You are already doing a non-standard HTML embedding HTML into javascript, why not do it better? https://civet.dev/reference#jsx
I am not convinced that all the syntax nicety is necessary, but improved pattern matching is often a great thing. On the other hand their examples seem to be to pattern match on highly dynamic types, which you can avoid 95% of the time with TypeScript.
The JSX spec hasn't changed for almost 10 years, and I'd guess there will never be a JSX 2.0. On the other hand, ideas for a better JSX are plentiful (check out the issues on the JSX repo, for example). If the spec never changes, how can we improve the JSX experience? Transpilation!
Civet's futuristic JSX compiles to actual spec-compliant JSX, to it's compatible with all forms of JSX, including React, Solid, etc. We'd like to support other DSLs like Astro and Svelte as well.
Not so sure. JSX is already a transpilation language. Why target a language that's only supported as an input language for other compilers? I don't think this is an LLVM-type scenario.
As an example, Solid's JSX compiler changes multiple times in a year. It's better to target JSX than the compiled form. There are also many JSX compilers. (Even React ships with at least two.)
- "everything is an expression" is a nicer solution for conditional assignments and returns than massive ternary expressions
- the pipe operator feels familiar from Elixir and is somewhat similar to Clojure's threading macros.
- being able to use the spread operator in the middle of an array? Sure, I guess.
I want to like the pattern matching proposal, but the syntax looks slightly too minimal.
The other proposals are either neutral or bad, in my opinion. Custom infix operators? Unbraced object literals? I'm not sure that anyone has a problem that these things solve, other than trying to minimize the number of characters in their source code.
Still, I'm glad that this exists, because allowing people to play with these things and learn from them is a good way to figure out which proposals are worth pursuing. I just won't be using it myself.
Do blocks in Civet are mainly to provide shielded scopes (with local declarations). They're currently also necessary to handle declarations (const/let) in the middle of expressions, but hopefully they won't be necessary eventually - only when the user wants to shield scopes. They also have useful forms like `async do` that let you build Promises using await-style code.
I'll pass on the pipe operator, but it's not particularly objectionable.
Agree there's some good ideas. Pattern matching looks like a great idea with the wrong syntax - let's just get a match statement similar to the switch statement - if we can't reuse switch.
String dedent and chained comparisons look nice. Though I think the latter is a breaking change if it were done in js. I'd also be fine with default const for loop variables.
"Export convenience" is going to confuse people. The syntax looks different than named exports and looks closer to the export form of default imports which is begging for trouble.
Exactly. It also massively improves readability by reordering the code to match the order of operations. Also long nested chains of function calls make it so the arguments for each call get spread out, so your eyes have to go back and forth to determine what function receives what.
This just looks like it's trying to remove as much syntax as possible and as a consequence makes it harder for me to follow what's going on. Kind of like a write-only language.
I do not particularly like the lack of brackets everywhere. I think it is hard to know precedence perfectly and brackets ensure you do not make stupid mistakes.
Also there is the classic issue where you take an if statement that has a line one expression and you add a second line, but now because it didn't have brackets (and you are not using indentation style), you just introduced a bug. Or you have an if statement with an expression and you comment out the expression but not the if, then your next statement is now the if conditional expression, which is not obvious.
But we are using indentation style; that's one of the major design principles. In Civet, the body of an "if" can be multiple lines, and it's clear (from indentation) what they're nested under. Also, the body of an "if" statement can be empty, so if you comment out the body, the "if" doesn't apply to anything else. (This is an improvement over Python, which requires non-empty bodies, even if just to say "pass".)
I think there's a reason that Python is among the most popular programming languages, and part of it is the indentation-based syntax and lack of brackets. The core of Civet's syntax (originally inspired by CoffeeScript) is like a combination of JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, the two/three most popular programming languages.
But also, if you like brackets, you can include them! Most JavaScript/TypeScript code is also valid Civet. Just use the features you like.
Python used an indentation-based syntax from the beginning and its syntax is particularly optimized for that. In particular, any block statement (formally, a statement followed by a "suite") would end with `:` and that's effectively the only place where a dangling `:` can happen [1], so you can easily recognize such statement from any directions.
In comparison, at least some people would find CoffeeScript and Civet to be hard to read because they solely rely on left-bearing indents. If my eye is pointing to the rightmost column and scanning to left, I wouldn't be sure about any nature of the line until the very first token and thus preceding indent is reached. This problem is not unique but can be somehow alleviated with some tweaks to the syntax. Ruby `if` for example is also prone to this issue but an explicit `end` token keeps it on track in most cases. CoffeeScript did nothing.
[1] The only other case is `lambda ...:` in parenthesized expressions. `lambda` in Python is quite exceptional in its syntax after all...
>I think there's a reason that Python is among the most popular programming languages, and part of it is the indentation-based syntax and lack of brackets.
Perhaps, but IMO that will then be because it looks tempting at first glance like YAML. No matter how much Python I write, I never learned to enjoy this and the fact that I can't select inside/around brackets to quickly manipulate a scope is just so frustrating.
The pattern matching (TC39 stage 1) and pipeline operators (TC39 stage 2) look great, and I'd love to have those in TypeScript. It will probably take a loooong while for those features to be available in JavaScript, but I feel like I can live without those for now :-).
Fwiw it seems a lot of people really like the concept of "significant indentation". I'm thinking Python, YAML, Godot's GDScript. Not a lof of languages implement it but those that do seem to get a lot of users.
Interestingly, it seems like Erik Demain [1] is one of the contributors [2] of this project.
Note that the pipe operator is the rejected tacit pipes from TC-39. TC-39 made the (IMO) wrong choice of what they call hack style pipes (with a mandatory token) where instead of the pipe being a simple way to call unary functions. Civet seems to have picked the better pipes.
I know this hasn't been updated, and I know it's a fork of CoffeeScript, but https://livescript.net/ has had a lot of the "magic" syntax here for quite a while.
Yes, Civet has taken a lot of syntactic inspiration from LiveScript. At this point, I think we have most of the good features, but we might be missing some. Let us know what you think!
The big difference, of course, is that Civet fully supports TypeScript, and is up-to-date with the latest JavaScript and TypeScript features.
So make sure you introduce this in your company; become the subject expert in it, invite everyone to very cool sessions demonstrating how cool it is, and secure your job until the next rewrite!
Looking at the examples, 1/5th of it looked neat, which probably would be best to submit a proposal for |> to the typescript committee rather than write another alienation.
This is a solution looking for a problem to solve. It introduces an alternative and does so as a superset; which is not only dangerous to existing code bases, but also silly.
An alternative way to do something in a code base, for no other reason than style, is a recipe for technical debt. It builds up a larger cognitive load on the developers navigating and working the code base and induces more chances of bugs via half-refactors, or half-considerations.
As for the superset comment, I meant that if you introduce a completely different language, you probably have a valid reason; e.g. it does something different. Adding to an existing language with a superset without any need for it is also dangerous. It's not like it's a DSL at a higher level helping people get repetitive or scriptable things done faster. It's only an alternative, leading people down rabbit hole and second guessing with a lot more to remember.
I see. I misinterpreted your meaning of the word "existing" - I thought you were implying that, by virtue of the introduction of the alternative, any existing codebases would _immediately and instantly_ be worsened, whereas it seems that you're saying that continued (future) development _on_ existing codebases would deteriorate due to those alternatives. That's a fair criticism! I don't fall on the same point in the "alternatives provide better-focused tools <-> alternatives create cognitive load" spectrum as you do, but I see your point.
> It's not like it's a DSL at a higher level helping people get repetitive or scriptable things done faster.
I mean, I have to disagree with you there, because several of the comparisons on the main site page show >50% line-count reduction, and many of those that don't have (subjectivity-alert!) representations that more-clearly match my mental model of how the code works - so not only would I be executing fewer keystrokes to encode my idea (not the main bottleneck, but not irrelevant!), but also I'd be carrying out fewer mental translations to get from idea to code.
* `{min, max} := Math` is a destructuring declaration. It's similar to the destructuring assignment `{min, max} = Math` (i.e., `min = Math.min; max = Math.max`), but also declares min and max as const.
* The `operator` prefix means to treat min and max as new infix operators in the rest of the program.
Second line:
Given that min and max are infix operators, `value min ceiling max floor` is equivalent to `max(min(value, ceiling), floor)`. Yes, the latter is gross. That's why we like to write `value min ceiling max floor` instead. Think of it as "value minned with ceilling (i.e. capped at ceiling), then maxed with floor (i.e. prevented from going below floor)".
236 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadSyntactic sugar can’t be the only thing that makes a programming language.
Assembly adds mnemonics and a logical structure to machine code.
C largely does the same, but adds a cross-platform abstraction, mechanisms for organizing and sharing source code, a standard library, and various other things.
That is, something that works the same but looks better (hopefully).
A cross-CPU abstraction, a preprocessor, a standard library all have certain elements of syntax in them, but go well beyond alternative syntax.
without the pipe operator you would write ` fun1(fun2(fun3(fun4(fun5(x, y), z, w), u), v)) `
The order of operations in this line is actually from right to left. Also it's not immediately obvious to which function the u parameter belongs to.
With the pipe operate you would write it in the order that the functions are actually called and you have the arguments in the same location as the function they belong to. So this would be written something like
` fun5(x, y) |> fun4(z, w) |> fun3(u) |> fun2(v) |> fun1() `
I wrote a bunch of CoffeeScript back in the day, and everyone I've spoken to about it feels the same, that it was a bad idea in hindsight, and a language dead end. The language was only syntactic sugar, and by not bringing anything else to the table, was unconvincing for ports and support in other ecosystems. It now seems that most codebases have been decaffeinated though.
Civet looks like it adds a little more, but the things that aren't just syntactic sugar are just a grab bag of TC39 proposals. I'm a big fan of language proposals in general, and having a language that adds all of them for research purposes seems like a nice thing to have. Haskell did this well with GHC language options. Is this a research language though? It seems not.
What's the benefit over Typescript? A few less characters? Faster TC39 proposal integrations? What happens if a proposal is rejected, does it get removed from Civet? What's the cost? What happens as Typescript and Civet diverge? What if the TS tooling doesn't support Civet features?
I agree a research language feels potentially useful — and in fact that's what CoffeeScript's real legacy is (arrow functions, splats, destructuring assignments, and ES6 classes among others are direct ports of CoffeeScript syntax features, and many of the original JS class proposals that CoffeeScript-style classes replaced were quite bad) — but I'd be similarly leery of using this to ship much.
I don't think it was a bad idea in hindsight.
JS of the era was a pain to use; CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier, which is the reason it took off. Since then things changed and many "CoffeeScript features" are now "JavaScript features". Only with knowledge of that future would it be a "bad idea", but it was absolutely not clear that was going to happen back in 2010 and in alternative universes we're all writing CoffeeScript today.
I also think CoffeeScript was probably helpful in getting some of these features adopted in the first place.
The same applies to TypeScript – maybe typing will be added to JavaScript, and TypeScript will become redundant – I think there was some proposal and who knows what will happen. In 15 years we can say the same about TypeScript, but that doesn't mean TypeScript wasn't useful today, with the current state of JavaScript and uncertainty what the future may or may not bring.
My point is that it kinda didn't. It looked prettier on the surface, but didn't actually solve any of the deeper problems of writing JavaScript. To write CoffeeScript you had to still know JavaScript and all its oddities.
TypeScript solved those problems, and that's why it has taken off and had a meteoric rise to the point that it's practically synonymous with JavaScript.
> I also think CoffeeScript was probably helpful in getting some of these features adopted in the first place.
This may be true, but if so that suggests a benefit as a research language not a production language.
And then it ruined us with implicit returns, optional parentheses and brackets, and the isnt vs is not fiasco.
I worked a lot with Python and coffeescript at the same time back in the day. In Python you mess up your whitespace and 95% of the time it's an indentation error. In coffeescript it's a valid program that means something completely different than what you intended. Combined with the optional punctuation, which the community encouraged leaning into, it was far too easy to write ambiguous code that you and the compiler would come to different interpretations of.
* `is not` is the textual equivalent of `!==`. You can use `isnt` if you turn on the feature explicitly (or even the weird CoffeeScript `is not` behavior if you want it, mainly for legacy code)
* Implicit returns are turned on by default. They are really useful, most of the time, and don't get in the way much if you use `void` return annotations (which turns them off). But if you don't like them, you can turn them off globally with a compiler flag.
* Civet's compiler is built on very different technology from CoffeeScript's (PEG parsing, similar to Python), and it is much more strict about indentation. None of those weird bugs anymore.
* We do have implicit parentheses and braces and such, but you're free to use explicit parentheses and braces as you like. We encourage people to rename their .ts files into .civet (which mostly just works without any converison) and just embrace the features/syntax they like.
I’ve been eying Civet and I quite like it so far, but I dislike having this option because it means I’ll have to see it in other peoples code. I prefer strict rules for readability.
Regardless, I like pretty much everything else.
Oh man, that brings memories. When I joined a coffee-shop (pun intended), and learnt about implicit returns, I was screaming internally until we got rid of all the coffee (which was massive long team-wide migration effort that took like 2y to finish).
Once the migration was finished, everyone was so tired, that at the mere proposal of using TypeScript instead of JS the whole team would just roll their eyes and silently say "nope" in terror. Which was a shame, because large JS codebases are difficult to maintain and explore.
So I think this has more to do with how people are used to thinking with the languages they are fluent in.
What was so ruinous about implicit returns? That's one of the things I missed most when leaving CoffeeScript. ECMAScript only partially adopted it (single statement fat arrow functions) which probably muddies the waters for people trying to learn and understand the language's behavior.
Since it's optional for the caller to use or assign the return value of a function, I don't see much problem with functions defaulting to returning something. Maybe it just fits with my personal preference of functions returning a value and not having side-effects..
easy enough to add an extra line with just 'undefined' as the last statement of the function of course. but then you do need to remember that.
People can adapt either way. You can write more concise code with implicit returns and "everything is an expression".
Convenience does matter. The less I have to think about nonsense like that, the more I can think about actually writing correct code.
CoffeeScript wasn't perfect in that sense either and had some nonsense of its own. That probably contributed to its demise as much as any thing else.
I don't think TS removed any peculiarities of JS. It just forced you to actually learn them which JS and CS didn't do.
Many times something would look perfectly reasonable in CoffeeScript but when you would actually read the JS it would be iterating the same dataset multiple times to grab individual items that could have and should have been a single loop.
1. https://donatstudios.com/CoffeeScript-Madness
It's also backed – nay, pushed – by one of the largest and most successful tech companies in the world. A company that also made a point of releasing a very capable IDE to go along with it. Surely this has had some impact on its meteoric rise? :o)
(Wait – aren't meteors falling?)
It didn't. Anything you learn / are familiar with will be easier to write - Coffescript was easier to write for people who learned Coffescript. Which in hindsight wasn't time well spent as they would've eventually had to bite the bullet anyway & just learn JavaScript like everyone else.
JavaScript is much much easier to write and read for a person who has chosen to learn JavaScript & has not had the occasion to learn Coffescript (i.e. most people) so you were also doing others a disservice if readability was one of your goals.
> which is the reason it took off
The reason it took off was the Ruby was going through a popularity trend & Rails devs wanted to work in a front-end language that felt syntactically familiar. It was purely aesthetic.
But you're right that you did have to know enough JS to understand what CoffeeScript was doing under the hood when things went wrong.
It probably died fueling the whole js build/transpiler landscape that is in use today.
Was it really?
Outside of arrow functions, I don't really think CoffeeScript had a single important idea. And even then, the aversion to the `function` keyword in the JavaScript community never fails to make me laugh. Sure, sometimes the implicit scoping of the arrow function is nice, but man.
Over time, JavaScript evolved to the point where the few quality of life improvements offered by CoffeeScript no longer justified learning an entirely new syntax.
Admittedly, I don't do much Android development, and that was a big driver of Kotlin's adoption early on. So maybe it has more of a foothold there than on the server.
The "systems" language of the platform, evolves with the platform, is designed alongside the platform.
The guest languages might be better than the platform's "systems" language, on the day of the release, eventually it is bound to diverge with its own library ecosystem built on top (because "ugh" we're not using the platform libraries directly), its own IDE tooling, its additional debugging layer due to platform interop, its own abstractions not native to the platform,.....
Eventually it naturally diverges as the platform takes incompatible decisions,...
C and C++ on UNIX, JavaScript and anything compiles to JS, Java vs Groovy/Scala/Clojure/Kotlin/jTCL/Beanshell/jython/...., C# vs VB.NET/F#/C++/CLI/IronPython/IronRuby,...
The guest languages that are survive, are those that move beyond the platform that gave them birth and create a platform of their own.
In Kotlin's case that is definitely Android, because Android team is doing everything at their disposal to make Java a 2nd class language on Android, rewriting Jetpack libraries in Kotlin, requiring Kotlin for Compose, showing off Kotlin code samples against Java 8 examples(!), I bet they only starting updating Java support, because Android was starting to lose too many Java libraries as the Java ecosystem adopts new versions.
Still, Android 15 being released one year later from Java 21 LTS, is still catching up with Java 17 LTS, introduced in Android 13 and not yet fully implemented, kind of proves the point of them not being in a hurry for proper Java support on the platform.
But JS moved faster and babel was made and eventually we could use JS-future even when browsers hadn't updated yet and CoffeeScript wasn't needed. But it was pretty easy to translate it to JS, commit that and keep rolling. CS was great at the time.
I personally use Civet for all my coding projects, as I'm devoted to it continuing to flourish. But if you ever don't like what Civet is offering you, you can eject at any time by replacing your code with the TypeScript compilation, which we make as close as we can to your input.
What happens if a TC39 proposal is rejected? That's actually the good case for us, because it means we can keep the feature as is. Civet already transpiles all features to TypeScript, so they can live here forever if we think they're good. The trickier part is when Java/TypeScript changes in a way that's incompatible with Civet. Then we plan to change Civet to match Java/TypeScript, so that we don't diverge (though compiler flags allow us to also support the older form with explicit opt-in if we think it's worth doing so).
JavaScript and TypeScript move slow. Largely that's a good thing; they're a stable foundation, and we don't want to mess them up. But it's also exciting to be on the bleeding edge, explore new ideas, and obtain new features as quickly as we can design them, instead of waiting a decade. Many features are also too niche / add to much complexity for the general JavaScript language, but they're still fair game for languages that transpile to JavaScript. See also the recent JS0 vs. JSSugar discussion.
I still have gripes about runtimes such as Nodejs, but I don't expect something like Civet to solve those.
The addition of quick things you whipped up in a couple of hours seems like it'll make the rate of changes impossible to handle. It's unlikely almost by definition that the change you whipped up quickly will stand the test of repeated use and further experience unmodified.
All that said, it's a super fun thing to do, and hats off for such an ambitious project. If nothing else, writing a parser, transpiler, etc. is impressive and fun work, and will undoubtedly enable/force you to learn all the javascript/TS quirks and details extremely well! :-)
The other big one, which unfortunately Civet seems to be doing too, is implicit return combined with “everything is an expression”. You can have one of those, but not both. With both, it’s far too easy to write loops intended to be statements, and which accidentally turn into gigantic multi-dimensional array returns which can’t easily be optimized out by the compiler. Fortunately, this would be only mildly inconvenient to work around with a lint rule that forces explicit return in all functions.
I agree it can be easy to make and throw away big arrays if you're not aware of what's going on. But it can also save a lot of time. For loops as arrays are super useful, integrating the equivalent of "map" into the language itself. We also recently added generator versions (for*). JSX is a nice example where for loops as expressions and implicit return are powerful; see e.g. https://civet.dev/reference#code-children
What might work well is a lint rule to error if a loop expression ends an actual function declaration (i.e. not an inline callback), and the function doesn’t explicitly define a return type. I think that catches almost every bad case, aside from the odd memory leak in really unusual edge cases.
For example, you might have an “x” in some inner loop within a function. Then later on, you’d add an “x” earlier in the function, not realizing that that name was used down below. Suddenly the inner loop is referencing that new variable, and there was no way to tell other than the surprising ways your code would suddenly malfunction.
Hang on, how can you have “everything is an expression” without implicit return? If I’m correctly understanding what you’re talking about, implicit return isn’t actually a thing—it’s just that the function body is an expression too.
(Never dealt with CoffeeScript, but I’ve been writing Rust for over a decade now, and learned to love expression-orientation there.)
Types help quite a bit with implicit returns so you don't accidentally return an iteration results array from a void function.
They also help reduce the downsides of terse syntax, just hover over things in the IDE and see what they are. Missed a step in a pipeline? The IDE will warn you if there's a mismatch.
Getting hands on experience with those proposals could be an argument, learning how they feel, learning how their availability changes the way people write code. Could this be called a research language? Sure, but that categorization would certainly influence the outcome of the observation.
I'm not disagreeing with any of your points though. Perhaps some mitigation could be provided by making their equivalent of decaffeinization a true first class citizen, intended to be run whenever a proposal gets rejected (or implicitly rejected by the language taking a different direction). This would have to be fine grained, and the language/tool would have to make "rolling preview of whatever proposals are currently in consideration" the code of its identity, not any particular set of language features.
I would rather do with a stricter super set of TypeScript with some sugar/conveniences around its many verbose but useful features like branded types.
I have a hard time understanding the motivation of this project other than syntactic sugar-maxxing JS/TS.
B) What are the downsides?
For the languages that target wasm instead, there are different debugging stories. Kotlin's is very good, Rust's is pretty immature.
Source maps work great for TS because it is just "JavaScript with types" at this point.
> Rust began as a personal project in 2006 by Mozilla Research employee Graydon Hoare, named after the group of fungi that are "over-engineered for survival". Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009, and would employ a dozen engineers to work on it full time over the next ten years
So by 2013 it was already 7 years old. I very much doubt the original personal project was viewed as "a lot of sense" etc.
If you’re interested in targeting JavaScript, languages like this are your only reasonable alternative to JavaScript itself. (If you’re interested in targeting the web more generally, WebAssembly is a better target.)
If you don’t mind I guess you could just render to a canvas but then you lose a ton of functionality provided by the browser. (Eg: making a responsive page in WASM seems hard)
It seems to me for most web applications JS is the only real alternative as of now
It’s completely fine. At present you’ll need to trampoline via JS to make the actual DOM calls, but that’s not typically a performance bottleneck; and such bindings can give you exactly the same API, if you choose.
Yes, work is just about done in browsers for giving you direct access to these things without the JS trampolining, and lots of people are hanging out for that to be dependable, but in practical terms it changes nothing. Nothing. No change in expressiveness; it only gets you probably slightly better performance, and a simpler technique for binding (which is typically immaterial for end users, as libraries were handling that for them).
Much of the rest I could take or leave… but then is that just because I’m not familiar with them? Stuff like the pipe operator makes sense to me but it reminds me of .reduce(): there are a few legitimate uses of it but the vast majority will be entirely-too-smart—for-its-own-good show off coding.
Kinda feels like someone was forced to work in Typescript and really wanted to scratch their own itch.
This has made me even more convinced that the future of JavaScript is JavaScript.
We will be seeing JavaScript (natively) having all the types, features and proposals that TypeScript has and the industry will eventually move on from TypeScript.
I am not convinced that all the syntax nicety is necessary, but improved pattern matching is often a great thing. On the other hand their examples seem to be to pattern match on highly dynamic types, which you can avoid 95% of the time with TypeScript.
Civet's futuristic JSX compiles to actual spec-compliant JSX, to it's compatible with all forms of JSX, including React, Solid, etc. We'd like to support other DSLs like Astro and Svelte as well.
- "everything is an expression" is a nicer solution for conditional assignments and returns than massive ternary expressions
- the pipe operator feels familiar from Elixir and is somewhat similar to Clojure's threading macros.
- being able to use the spread operator in the middle of an array? Sure, I guess.
I want to like the pattern matching proposal, but the syntax looks slightly too minimal.
The other proposals are either neutral or bad, in my opinion. Custom infix operators? Unbraced object literals? I'm not sure that anyone has a problem that these things solve, other than trying to minimize the number of characters in their source code.
Still, I'm glad that this exists, because allowing people to play with these things and learn from them is a good way to figure out which proposals are worth pursuing. I just won't be using it myself.
Agree there's some good ideas. Pattern matching looks like a great idea with the wrong syntax - let's just get a match statement similar to the switch statement - if we can't reuse switch.
String dedent and chained comparisons look nice. Though I think the latter is a breaking change if it were done in js. I'd also be fine with default const for loop variables.
"Export convenience" is going to confuse people. The syntax looks different than named exports and looks closer to the export form of default imports which is begging for trouble.
Also there is the classic issue where you take an if statement that has a line one expression and you add a second line, but now because it didn't have brackets (and you are not using indentation style), you just introduced a bug. Or you have an if statement with an expression and you comment out the expression but not the if, then your next statement is now the if conditional expression, which is not obvious.
I think there's a reason that Python is among the most popular programming languages, and part of it is the indentation-based syntax and lack of brackets. The core of Civet's syntax (originally inspired by CoffeeScript) is like a combination of JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, the two/three most popular programming languages.
But also, if you like brackets, you can include them! Most JavaScript/TypeScript code is also valid Civet. Just use the features you like.
In comparison, at least some people would find CoffeeScript and Civet to be hard to read because they solely rely on left-bearing indents. If my eye is pointing to the rightmost column and scanning to left, I wouldn't be sure about any nature of the line until the very first token and thus preceding indent is reached. This problem is not unique but can be somehow alleviated with some tweaks to the syntax. Ruby `if` for example is also prone to this issue but an explicit `end` token keeps it on track in most cases. CoffeeScript did nothing.
[1] The only other case is `lambda ...:` in parenthesized expressions. `lambda` in Python is quite exceptional in its syntax after all...
Perhaps, but IMO that will then be because it looks tempting at first glance like YAML. No matter how much Python I write, I never learned to enjoy this and the fact that I can't select inside/around brackets to quickly manipulate a scope is just so frustrating.
I didn't realize Civet is indentation-based like Python. That isn't so bad.
Fwiw it seems a lot of people really like the concept of "significant indentation". I'm thinking Python, YAML, Godot's GDScript. Not a lof of languages implement it but those that do seem to get a lot of users.
Interestingly, it seems like Erik Demain [1] is one of the contributors [2] of this project.
--
1: https://github.com/DanielXMoore/Civet/graphs/contributors
2: https://erikdemaine.org/
The syntax and some other features, no. Some are even anti-features or "magic" that takes the actual semantics away from the developer.
The big difference, of course, is that Civet fully supports TypeScript, and is up-to-date with the latest JavaScript and TypeScript features.
I loved LiveScript, but it got kinda lost in the wake of ES6.
They planned to add types, but never got around doing it (at least the last time I looked).
1. `wxyz = [ 2 8 -5 5 ]` (commas optional for non callables)
2. `console.log \hello` (backslash strings)
Don't know how hard/compatible #1 is, but for #2 I had a tested PR that I could bring around.
(#3 was bulleted lists, but you already added that!)
Looking at the examples, 1/5th of it looked neat, which probably would be best to submit a proposal for |> to the typescript committee rather than write another alienation.
This is a solution looking for a problem to solve. It introduces an alternative and does so as a superset; which is not only dangerous to existing code bases, but also silly.
How so?
As for the superset comment, I meant that if you introduce a completely different language, you probably have a valid reason; e.g. it does something different. Adding to an existing language with a superset without any need for it is also dangerous. It's not like it's a DSL at a higher level helping people get repetitive or scriptable things done faster. It's only an alternative, leading people down rabbit hole and second guessing with a lot more to remember.
> It's not like it's a DSL at a higher level helping people get repetitive or scriptable things done faster.
I mean, I have to disagree with you there, because several of the comparisons on the main site page show >50% line-count reduction, and many of those that don't have (subjectivity-alert!) representations that more-clearly match my mental model of how the code works - so not only would I be executing fewer keystrokes to encode my idea (not the main bottleneck, but not irrelevant!), but also I'd be carrying out fewer mental translations to get from idea to code.
First line:
* `{min, max} := Math` is a destructuring declaration. It's similar to the destructuring assignment `{min, max} = Math` (i.e., `min = Math.min; max = Math.max`), but also declares min and max as const.
* The `operator` prefix means to treat min and max as new infix operators in the rest of the program.
Second line:
Given that min and max are infix operators, `value min ceiling max floor` is equivalent to `max(min(value, ceiling), floor)`. Yes, the latter is gross. That's why we like to write `value min ceiling max floor` instead. Think of it as "value minned with ceilling (i.e. capped at ceiling), then maxed with floor (i.e. prevented from going below floor)".