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0 pointsavaq9mo ago0 comments

They can't implement function application without tanking performance? I find that hard to believe. Especially considering that function application is already a commonly used (and, dare I say: essential) feature in the language, eg: `Math.sqrt(2)`.

All we're asking for is the ability to rewrite that as `2 |> Math.sqrt`.

What they're afraid of, my understanding goes, is that people hypothetically, may start leaning more on closures, which themselves perform worse than classes.

However I'm of the opinion that the engine implementors shouldn't really concern themselves to that extent with how people write their code. People can always write slow code, and that's their own responsibility. So I don't know about "silly", but I don't agree with it.

Unless I misunderstood and somehow doing function application a little different is actually a really hard problem. Who knows.

0 comments

nilslindemann9mo ago

Your simple example (`2 |> Math.sqrt`) looks great, but when the code gets more complex, then the advantage of the pipe syntax is less obvious. For example,

    foo(1, bar(2, baz(3)), 3)

becomes something like

    1 (2, (3 |> baz) > bar), 3 |> foo

    (3 |> baz) |> (2, % |> bar) |> (1, %, 3 |> foo)

That looks like just another way to write a thing in JavaScript, and it is not easier to read. What is the advantage?

avaqOP9mo ago

Uhm, don't do it, then. That's like arguing that the addition of the ternary operator is a bad one because not all if/else blocks look better when translated into it.

The goal is to linearlize unary function application, not to make all code look better.

sir_eliah9mo ago

I think the commenter meant that once the new syntax is approved and adopted by the community, you have no choice to not use the syntax. You'll eventually change your project and will be forced to deal with reviewing this code.

dotancohen9mo ago

_You_ might not use it, but somebody's going to send a PR, or some LLM is going to spit it out, or some previous maintainer put it in there, or will be in some tutorial, or it will be in some API documentation.

You are going to have to deal with it as a mess at some point. One of the downfalls of perl was the myriad of ways of doing any particular thing. We would laugh that perl was a write only language - nobody knew all the little syntax tricks.

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