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mmcromp | 4 months ago

I say the opposite, the lack of tooling highlights the weakness of the language. The drive to make it declarative/mimic "natural" language by reshuffling and overloading can be "delightful" to some, but beyond the paper covered surface is a mess. And for what ? "5.times do something unless" isn't cute to me. It's a dog "talking" by putting peanut butter in his mouth. But I think I'm the only one who feels this way

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lioeters|4 months ago

What I've noticed about language design is that people confuse their preferences and opinions with genuine objective observations. It's more of an art and aesthetics than a science. I agree "5.times" is an abomination but that's a subjective reaction - there's no principle or law that it violates (other than perhaps principle of least surprise). We can't quantify and measure how good or bad some invented syntax is.

As for lack of tooling, it apparently wasn't a priority when the language was designed. I'm guessing the emphasis was more on the ease of reading/writing, and having internal logical consistency. How such language design decisions make the development of tooling more difficult was a secondary concern.