Programs Should Be Valid as They Are Typed

I think this is a decently interesting consideration in programming language design. When you have things flowing from left to right, not only do you get better autocomplete as per the article, but it’s probably also easier to read, and very likely easier to edit (your cursor can simply go in its natural direction instead of having to jump around).

Though this comment on Lobsters points out that left-to-right code under one way of thinking is not necessarily left-to-right code if you approach it with a different way of thinking.

  • soc@programming.dev
    2·
    4 days ago

    This is one of the rules I religiously follow in the design of my language.

    It’s one of the reasons

    • why I removed unary operators like ! and ~ and made -foo.bar parse as (-foo).bar;
    • why the order of elements in a type or function definition is the way it is; and
    • why I use an OOP-style value.member design instead of piping syntax like |>.