nimforum mirror - Uncle Bob - one syntax to rule them all?

rbucker (orginal) [2020-06-01T20:25:37+02:00] view original

After watching Uncle "Bob" Martin lectures for hours I was left with one nagging thought. If we would benefit from one programming language why do we have so many? AND where do we go from here? He does talk about different models like procedural, structured and functional programming languages and skirts the [a] syntax being special purpose; and [b] the syntax is about adding constraints or things you cannot do.

Reasons "we" write a lot of BASH scripts is because [a] the SAME syntax is available on most platforms [b] it just works [c] it's complete [d] it's simple ... and so on. For example I have a bash script that I use to build and deploy a particular project. It does everything I need but it depends on a 'jot' function that is not available on all of the target operating systems. So I rewrote it in tcl and it works great. tcl, like bash, has not changed much even though there have been numerous releases. The best part is that, like lisp, the interpreter is simple to implement. (see golang 3rd party packages and "tcl in 500 lines")

So what's interesting here, if I say this correctly, is that NIM has both a translated (meta) approach to convert nim to (js, c, c++) and can also run as an interpreted language. In the past few days I did some example/tutorials on ClearLinux (optimized for Intel and SUPER fast). I had a couple of failures because of the way ClearLinux handles the /etc folder and that the nim installer is only aware of /etc in it's config load path and the default nim.cfg.

Nim's syntax seems very reasonable. I would use it as-is if there were just a few more libraries like a SQL Server DB driver, XLSX file API. Maybe a few more but nothing off the top of my head.

If nim were to heed Uncle Bob... then nim could be the one DSL to rule them all. Consider writing your API in NIM and then converting them any other language. Client and server side. Right now I'm building some projects that would benefit from one language to rule them all. If I were a hiring manager I would be looking for devs who could pull that off.

Thanks for listening.

Yardanico (orginal) [2020-06-02T08:01:29+02:00] view original

Isn't that what Haxe tries to be? Although it's mainly aimed at game developers I think it has the goals that you described here.

mratsim (orginal) [2020-06-02T10:31:04+02:00] view original

Just like a carpenter has a hammer, screwdrivers, tapes, wrenches, pliers, drills, saws for different purposes, developing is not about trying to hammer nails with a Swiss Army Knife but choosing the right tool for the right purposes.

zulu (orginal) [2020-06-02T11:36:41+02:00] view original

Nim's syntax seems very reasonable. I would use it as-is if there were just a few more libraries like a SQL Server DB driver, XLSX file API. Maybe a few more but nothing off the top of my head.

There are but they are 1 man projects.

exelotl (orginal) [2020-06-02T20:13:51+02:00] view original

Ironically I don't think Uncle Bob would like Nim at all, given our general preferance towards straightforward "get shit done" procedural code. For example in this video the author critiques some of Bob's code and rewrites it in a simple procedural style. The resulting code is far more like what I would expect to see in a Nim codebase.

PMunch (orginal) [2020-06-04T13:59:24+02:00] view original

I liked the idea of that parser so I threw together an even better Nim version: https://play.nim-lang.org/#ix=2ogb. It parses the format on compile-time and creates a parser that returns a tuple with all the arguments. So now all the arguments have the correct type, and on runtime it's just a simple tuple access instead of looking through a bunch of hash tables for single character arguments. This is what I'd expect to find in a Nim codebase (although tidied up a bit, this is just something I threw together).

Araq (orginal) [2020-06-04T21:44:05+02:00] view original

but choosing the right tool for the right purposes.

Nim is the right tool for all purposes. ;-)

Mirror of forum.nim-lang.org

6396 :: Uncle Bob - one syntax to rule them all?