| 11 Dec 2025 |
 helle (just a stray cat girl) | (something something we made a mistake by using =, give me :=) | 21:31:10 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | or who don't work with the design of programming languages in general (because every modern optimised language ends up being that in the end) | 21:31:41 |
 rosssmyth | My overall biggest complaint with the nix lang is that lists should be separated with commas so that spaces are not quite as overloaded | 21:32:35 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | .... yes | 21:32:42 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | also so operator binding doesn't require as many braces or pipes | 21:33:22 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | well, dealing with | 21:33:29 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | it's fine now that I am used to nixlang, but it was a big pit fall early on | 21:33:52 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | and I have a background with Haskell (still wish that I could just cross compile Haskell to Nix, but well, that is a different story) | 21:34:17 |
| rosssmyth | I think there's a Gleam backend for Nix. Unsure how maintained it is. | 21:34:50 |
 Rutile (Commentator2.0) feel free to ping | In reply to @rosssmyth:matrix.org
My overall biggest complaint with the nix lang is that lists should be separated with commas so that spaces are not quite as overloaded What about scala sytle no brackets at all and just :: between the elements? :D
i.e.
a :: b :: c
/j | 21:36:04 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | noooooo | 21:36:15 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | wrote enough Scala, to go nooooo | 21:36:20 |
| helle (just a stray cat girl) | (we may have written in so many different languages at this point) | 21:36:35 |
| Rutile (Commentator2.0) feel free to ping | Oh wait, nvm :: was just the (right hand associated) prepend operator, one must end it with a :: Nil | 21:37:12 |
| Rutile (Commentator2.0) feel free to ping | Can nixlang2 get static typing at least?, the currrent one really feels like another javascript but for config instead of websites | 21:50:33 |
 K900 | My galaxy brain take is that actually statically typing Nix is basically impossible to make good | 21:54:17 |
| K900 | You need to do whole program inference, typescript style | 21:54:45 |
| K900 | And probably refinement typing too | 21:54:51 |
| rosssmyth | Yeah, if you can define the types for all the common Nixpkgs utilities then let me know | 22:03:52 |
| rosssmyth | like | 22:04:07 |
| rosssmyth | overlays | 22:04:08 |
 piegames | In reply to @charles:computer.surgery
you need some syntax to "dereference" a string as if it were a variable Yes, that would indeed be needed | 22:21:54 |
 0x4fbb09 it/its ⛯✇ΘΔ | that and it doesn't really matter a ton because nix being a config language means there is no "runtime crash", really | 22:22:55 |
| 0x4fbb09 it/its ⛯✇ΘΔ | the difference between a type error and a runtime error is basically zero | 22:23:15 |
| rosssmyth | Also having to solve the types would just make eval slower | 22:24:30 |
| rosssmyth | 🎉 | 22:24:40 |
 KFears (burnt out) | In reply to @charles:computer.surgery
if i were designing a language from scratch and i wanted support for more or less arbitrary identifiers, i would have two kinds of identifiers:
- literal identifiers, like
foo, foo_bar, _foo123, etc; XID_Start followed by >=0 XID_Continue
- string identifiers, like
i"..." to use an arbitrary string of characters and escape sequences to construct an identifier
I think that sounds ideal | 22:24:50 |
| piegames | In reply to @piegames:flausch.social
Yes, that would indeed be needed But really the question is: why do we need arbitrary identifiers in the first place? | 22:26:32 |
| piegames | We need them for attrsets obviously, and a way to access those, but we already have that. Having a "foo bar" key is important, but having a variable named "foo bar" in a let binding? What for? | 22:27:27 |
| KFears (burnt out) | In reply to @helle:tacobelllabs.net
but I am just using this to demonstrate cases to worry about with UX and teaching, not so much as an actual thing to work on right now I think in the context of programming languages, it is common to have a section on "variables", and there it's explained that "you can give a name to the value, the name must start with an English letter and can contain numbers and - and _ | 22:27:33 |
