alt Hacker News> Programming language syntax scarcely matters.
Certainly it matters much less in the modern era.
However, certain fundamental decisions of a language can be dealbreakers.
Requiring declarations on your functions and giving those declarations sigils so that they can be parsed quickly is an important syntax decision. Almost every modern programming language has converged to this idea.
Or take, for example, Lua. For me, personally, the 1-based-ness of Lua is simply a dealbreaker no matter how good anything else about it is.
For the "Lisps", I LOATHE the fact that you traverse lists and vectors in completely different ways--you can't just drop any container-ish thing into something that iterates/collects it. This is something that both Clojure and Racket seem to agree on--you have something that acts like a "collection" and you can walk across it the same way regardless of the specific type of collection it is. Of course, that is why a bunch of Lisp purists loathe Clojure and Racket while I like those languages. Shrug.
I find RAII (Resource acquisition is initialization) to be the source of all things evil if it infests a programming language. The popularity of C++ and Rust speaks to the quite large number of people who think my opinion is bullshit.
So, yeah, base syntax matters far less than it used to. But the engineering decisions that went into making that syntax correspondingly are far more important.
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I think we can easily agree they are two entities (syntax / runtime) that feed off of each other. And I do agree that previously the syntax mattered more.
(I very much agree on Lua btw.)
Personally I am very disheartened. Surely algebraic data types should be universally a good thing and all PLs should gradually adopt them? But no, endless HN / Reddit threads bike-shedding.
Oh well.
I agree with most of what you said, but I am puzzled about your claim about RAII.
Whether it is good for any kind of resource acquisition to look the same like an initialization is debatable.
On the other hand, I cannot see any counterargument to the principle that releasing any resources should not be done explicitly, but only implicitly, upon leaving a block (using reference counts for shared resources).
I doubt that you advocate for the use of explicit release commands for resources, which are a notorious source of bugs, so what is that you consider as not being the same as RAII?
RAII was a not very useful acronym that was just another form to say that the C or C++ programmers should never use the PL/I style of explicit free commands, despite the availability of functions like "free()" or "close()" in the standard library, but both memory and files and any other kinds of resources should be managed with automatic releasing.
I do not see how this sound principle can infest any language.
Obviously, I have seen examples of bad RAII implementations, like I have seen examples of misuse for any other programming principle.