showell

6 ms·

1.
by showell 17y ago
Yep, my mention of do/end or squigglies was just a caveat on the Ruby-is-more-terse-in-this-example statement in the context of anonymous functions or blocks. I wish there was a language that won on both terseness metrics--i.e. a Ruby with
2.
by showell 17y ago
First of all, your objection to anonymous functions with an example that names the function in two different places kind of takes us off topic from the discussion of "anonymous" functions, but I will still respond. Second of all, multilin
3.
by showell 17y ago
I don't think the fights should be vicious, but I think the stakes are fairly high, and even though Ruby and Python are close cousins in the grand scheme of things, they really do represent profoundly different philosophies when you look mo
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by showell 17y ago
You might be taking the statement out of context, and you are certainly quoting it out of context (although brevity is appreciated.) The statement in the talk was made to illustrate the differences between Ruby and Python, and it was not ma
5.
by showell 17y ago
Decorators and annotations are very useful in Python, but I still like the terseness of Ruby--no need to define "hello()". Of course, Python wins on a different kind of terseness--no do/end--but that is mostly orthogonal.
6.
by showell 17y ago
I wholeheartedly agree that all languages should be judged on the quality of their libraries and implementation, as well as the success of the projects implemented on top of them. Ruby and Python have a pretty good track record there. One
7.
by showell 17y ago
No worries. I am actually curious to your thoughts about DSLs. I love Python, but it is not really optimized for DSLs. You can obviously implement a DSL in Python, but embedding it is another story.
8.
by showell 17y ago
The Laurnence Olivier analogy is stupid, inaccurate, and irrelevant.
9.
by showell 17y ago
If 0.001% of the world's population uses it, I think that comes out to something like 60,000 people. You can see here that I've already solved the problem of sharing SHPAML output using HTML: http://shpaml.webfactional.com/ You are right
10.
by showell 17y ago
This seems like a wild exaggeration: "The behaviour of every function in a mutable, imperative environment is dependent upon the state of all of the other (variables|attributes|bindings|whatever) in your program at the time the function is
11.
by showell 17y ago
I understand the objection to having too many mutually incompatible data formats, but I don't understand how Markdown is exempt from that concern. It achieves the goal of looking like what "people would write anyway," but at a higher cost
12.
by showell 17y ago
If my post made it sound like I am trying to stop people from doing anything, then it just came out wrong. I do think there are legitimate reasons to mostly build documents within a full-featured programming language, and I wouldn't stop p
13.
by showell 17y ago
It is not a promise, or even a goal, of SHPAML that it will relieve you the burden of understand the final output syntax, whether that is HTML or HTML combined with some template language. SHPAML users are expected to be literate in both HT
14.
by showell 17y ago
First of all, sorry about the name. SHPAML is not a pseudo-programming syntax. It is purely a markup language, so there are no programming constructs. SHPAML very deliberately tries to be a lightweight abstraction on top of HTML, unlike wi
15.
by showell 17y ago
Modern IDEs inject close tags and angle brackets into the source document. The SHPAML preprocessor injects that syntax into the target document. The use case applies to the person who wants clean syntax in the source document and executab
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by showell 17y ago
The reason I made SHPAML a one-way preprocessor is that my use cases haven't yet given me a compelling reason to write a round tripper, and preprocessing is simple to automate. I do not know what your criteria are for judging a "first-class
17.
by showell 17y ago
Other folks have tried to solve the problem of cleanly creating HTML from within Python itself, which I think is what you are alluding to. It's not a goal for me. To the extent that my markup is pretty static, but the content is dynamic,
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by showell 17y ago
I did not post the link here, nor did I call anything "beautiful," but I presume that the reason the original poster posted the link on a "discussion" site was to solicit "discussion." Immediate and forceful contradiction does not equate
19.
by showell 17y ago
I understand the use case, and if people are frequently sending you patches for your HTML, you probably want to make HTML the authoritative source. Do people frequently send you patches for HTML that you author? SHPAML does not allow you
20.
by showell 17y ago
Ah, that is indeed a nice feature. When I first looked at haml, I was all about the indentation (being from Python) and rather skeptical of the CSS sugar. But once I ported the CSS sugar to SHPAML, I found I started writing better markup.
21.
by showell 17y ago
My problem with HTML is not its lack of simplicity; it is its verbosity. SHPAML solves the (fairly) trivial problem of making HTML less verbose. The abstraction pays off for me insofar as I expect to use SHPAML for the next decade or so,
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by showell 17y ago
You don't technically need to install python to use SHPAML. You can try it online: http://shpaml.webfactional.com/tutorial/7 SHPAML is mostly targeted at Python users for now. If you are not using Python, but you like the idea of having
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by showell 17y ago
I wrote the comment about Wikipedia only to illustrate that HTML, like any standard, is not perfect for every use case. I find HTML expressive and generally easy to use. I wrote SHPAML in a way that I hope preserves the useful expressivene
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by showell 17y ago
SHPAML is definitely targeted at Python users and people who like meaningful whitespace (and associated terseness). Glad you like it! I have also been hand writing HTML for well over a decade too (as well as other means of producing HTML),
25.
by showell 17y ago
The movitation behind SHPAML isn't necessarily just to make the markup easier to write; it also tries to make it easier to read.
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by showell 17y ago
When you run SHPAML through the preprocessor, it produces HTML that you can share with other people. So it's not that big an issue. Your greater point is well taken, though--using SHPAML is particularly suited to small teams.
27.
by showell 17y ago
SHPAML replaces angle brackets and close tags with space-based indentation and pipes. The CSS sugar for #id and .classname is completely optional, and obviously if you know CSS, then the syntax should be familiar. I agree that there are pl
28.
by showell 17y ago
As the author of SHPAML, I have no problem with all the negative comments about lightweight syntax abstractions, as I've seen all the same arguments written against HAML. Most of the critics of SHPAML have probably never actually used it,