[HN Gopher] SPL: A programming language coding in a grid
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SPL: A programming language coding in a grid
Author : jinqueeny
Score : 33 points
Date : 2024-08-16 02:59 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.scudata.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.scudata.com)
| j-pb wrote:
| And yet in all the examples the code seems to be overflowing the
| grid.
| sidpatil wrote:
| Interesting that they avoided mentioning the term "spreadsheet"
| entirely.
| kragen wrote:
| yeah, i'd think the way to write this page would be to lead off
| with how exactly it's similar to and different from libreoffice
| calc or some other spreadsheet people are familiar with.
| instead they explain the similarities as if it's 01977 and the
| audience has never used a spreadsheet. if there are
| differences, i gave up on reading before i got to them
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I'm glad you posted this because I assumed they were using
| Excel or LibreOffice. Because of the way they'd written that
| article, it hadn't even occurred to me they weren't using a
| spreadsheet.
| kragen wrote:
| i think they are, it's just that the spreadsheet they're
| using is one they wrote themselves
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| > the variable has to be given a meaningful name, which is
| annoying
|
| _Not_ naming the variable is annoying to everyone except the
| original programmer. Variable names are a feature of existing
| code.
| munk-a wrote:
| Honestly - even arbitrary variable names are more to my liking
| than positional references. LOC tends to be an extremely
| unstable thing to reference and would make refactoring a royal
| pain.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| They argue that this is not a problem because the IDE
| automatically renumbers cell references.
|
| Yes, we definitely need more _textual_ (yes, SPL is textual
| IMO) languages that cannot be sensibly edited without the
| official IDE. (I 'll make an exception for actually visual
| programming languages, because we don't have a good
| interoperable format for those.)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Yeah, I thought that was a rather strange argument too. I mean,
| there have been occasions when I've spent more time
| pontificating over the naming conventions inside a function
| than I have writing that function. But that's been long lasting
| functions that needed to be easy for others to read. Calling
| the lack of variable naming "feature" is just weird.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| So, spreadsheets?
| munk-a wrote:
| Just as a note on naming - the namespace of SPL is already
| _incredibly overloaded_ so the searchability will be quite poor.
| It 's used (IMO misguidedly) by Splunk and has an older meaning
| in "System Programming Language" which used to be a pretty wide
| term to cover any architecture specific functionality activated
| by library from higher language (i.e. C) or directly through
| assembly.
|
| Granted, amusingly enough, for a language that specifically tries
| to account for the difficulty in naming variables, it is
| extremely fitting that the language is, itself, poorly named.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| For disappointed readers expecting a language that _actually_
| works in a grid, the original 2D programming language, Befunge:
| https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge
|
| There are more, such as ><> https://esolangs.org/wiki/Fish and
| MarioLANG https://esolangs.org/wiki/MarioLANG .
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(page generated 2024-08-20 23:01 UTC)