alt Hacker NewsMisery is trying to retrofit "bool", True/False, and nil/null to a language. C had to do that. Python had to do that. Getting those wrong is one of the classic language design mistakes. It seems like treating "True" as a value that equates to 1 will work, but then the special cases get you. Like being able to perform arithmetic on True.
Common language design boners:
- Not building in strings. That's now in the past. Everybody has strings. (Well, C...)
- Not building in multidimensional arrays of the numeric types. Everything that number-crunches needs them, and having multiple definitions is Not Fun and may lead to expensive re-copying between different libraries. This is an enormous blind spot in language design. It's one of the reasons FORTRAN, which has good multidimensional numeric arrays, is still often used for number-crunching.
- Not standardizing the small vectors (vec2, vec3, vec4) and their matrix friends. Graphics code depends on these, and it's really annoying if there are multiple slightly incompatible implementations. Especially since GPUs have hardware for those types, and you want CPU and GPU to use the same representations.
- Not having arrays of bits. Pascal had PACKED ARRAY[0..N] of BOOLEAN but that was lost in later languages. It's useful to have that as a language construct, because most modern CPUs have good hardware for dealing with bit strings, and you'd like the compiler to use it.
Most useful languages acquire these features, but, when they come in late, there are multiple similar implementations, and libraries made incompatible by depending on different implementations.
(Amusingly, when Second Life switched from Linden Scripting Language to Luau, they initially had True, TRUE, and true all in use, as different types with different semantics. I was able to persuade the devs to unify the boolean types.)
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> Not having arrays of bits. Pascal had PACKED ARRAY[0..N] of BOOLEAN but that was lost in later languages. It's useful to have that as a language construct, because most modern CPUs have good hardware for dealing with bit strings, and you'd like the compiler to use it.
I'm not sure exactly which features are responsible (I'm inclined to blame templates), but C++'s std::vector<bool> is a rough edge. For those unfamiliar, the standard specifies this vector template in a way that's not compatible with other vectors.
Oh wow, I had no idea that SL did another language change after migrating LSL to Mono. Surprising considering that happened late '00s/early '10s?
I'd consider LSL to have been foundational in my ultimate interest/career in software engineering. The strict typing, very usable compile/runtime errors, and good documentation/examples made it so easy to pick up as a teen. Not to mention as long as you didn't edit/save a script again it would always run the same regardless of updates.
Vectors & multidimesional arrays are something I'm 100% adding to my language's core.
It kind of started with vectors as the very first feature (I was sick & tired of libraries reinventing their own `Point`/`VectorN` in incompatible ways).
Strings are a really weird data type. I'm not sure you can do much better than C strings without implicitly requiring dynamic memory allocation, which C deliberately does not do.
Definitely agree on multidimensional arrays. I feel like efficient arrays in general are underrated in high-level language design.
You list a few absences but absences aren't the end of the world, I say it's worse when designers make a booboo where the language semantics are wrong. In C++ there are so many of these it's not sporting but a recurring example from the garbage collected languages would be the for-each loop mistake.
Several times now†, people make a language where the way a for-each loop (for each Goose in Geese ...) works is that there's a single variable Goose and each time around the loop we change which value is referred to by the Goose variable. This seems intuitively like a reasonable way to do this. But it's wrong and eventually your programmers will get nasty surprises. What you actually should deliver is an implementation where each time around the loop there's a new variable named Goose, that variable goes away at the end of that iteration and will be replaced by the next one, with the same exact name.
† At least Go and C#, I think there are others