soc
@smoredahl That's an absolute dog shit reason to be completely honest.
No matter how familiar it makes the language, it increases the inconsistency within the language itself, not to mention the complexity that comes with it.
I have a whole presentation about how stupid increasing familiarity at the expense of simplicity and consistency is.
One of the core reason why we can't have nice things in computing.
@smoredahl Not to mention that the people who want to add things don't even want to deal with the fallout, for instance figuring out what gets cut from presentations, workshops, tutorials.
It's just sad that nobody cares about learners/beginners when adding yet-another-thing.
@smoredahl Because it's always the same "I agree in principal that we shouldn't add more things, but my pet syntax addition should be exempt".
And then people who do *not* want to get new language additions get overridden by the 5% that want *this* feature and the cabal of people that do not care about this one, but have their own pet extension they want to add.
Language design is leaving things out.
@benjhm @smoredahl "Scala does not have enough ways to do the same thing", a sentence probably never spoken.
@smoredahl Familiarity is designing for existing users, simplicity is designing for everyone; see https://soc.me/languages/familiarity.
(I have had this discussion many times. I have heard every single argument on why *this* time repeating a past mistake for familiarity is good. It never works out.)
> After all, Brainfuck is incredibly simple and consistent :)
By that measure C++ should be very familiar, because it contains every feature ever imagined by someone. We know how that one worked out.