language design, re: My programming language is better than yours
@cjd Lua has the same thing and is more thoughtfully designed. 😛
Anyways, the language and the standard library are IMHO not the same thing.
And JS doesn't have a lot of competitive implementations and the language itself was forced onto people by web standards. That goes pretty directly against what you like about the small stdlib.
And I don't think running into 10 runtime errors every minute is a good beginner experience.
language design, re: My programming language is better than yours
@grainloom @cjd On the "runtime errors" thing - it may actually be better than compile-time errors for beginners, in a way.
The problem is that you need to balance feedback on what someone is doing (wrong), with giving the developer some satisfaction that they've built a thing.
People can get demotivated really easily by hours of compiler errors with nothing to show for it, and having something that kinda works but is still broken at runtime can mitigate that.
At the same time, if there's no clear feedback on what's being done wrong, they can feel like they're constantly building on quicksand and nothing ever works.
I'm suspecting that the ideal middle road here might be runtime errors with better 'domain isolation' + better introspectability and tooling than currently available for JS.
language design, re: My programming language is better than yours
@joepie91 @cjd Well, in #Haskell you can use delayed errors and stuff, and GHCi is pretty good for testing short snippets.
And then there is The Future in which Idris becomes a viable language.
Type errors usually give a Lot more info on what's being done wrong than runtime errors. Try tracking down a nil error in #Lua for instance. Especially in code that makes heavy use of mutability.