Introducing Spider 0.1

<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618739" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8618739</a>

What&#x27;s to love about this language:<p><pre><code> - &#x27;function&#x27; renamed to &#x27;fn&#x27; - syntax for message passing (a la Go&#x27;s channels) - syntax for promises - syntax for currying (!) - everything that coffeescript has </code></pre> In my opinion that seems to satisfy everything a modern Javascript programmer could want from a new language. I&#x27;m a CoffeeScript person myself and I love my super succinct code, but I&#x27;m also aware many people are turned off by lack of braces, and possibilities of ambiguity.<p>That and the fact that I&#x27;ve noticed my colleague has been rewriting callback code I wrote into ugly promise-like objects so they could be more powerful, so I think it&#x27;s a good time to be exploring for nicer ways of dealing with the issue, preferably with some sugar.

I installed spider-script through npm, but `spider somescript.spider` complains with $traceurRuntime not being defined. I can still compile the script, then require traceur and the script from another file, but I&#x27;d rather not have to do that just to try out the language :(<p>The FizzBuzz example is (still) bugged: it lacks semicolons and []s around [1...100].<p>Now for my thoughts: I like the way you handle globals, channels and async&#x2F;await. Currying syntax is nifty, I probably wouldn&#x27;t have chosen ^ but that&#x27;s a bit of an arbitrary choice I guess. For integer division I prefer &#x2F;&#x2F;, but I just realized you use that for comments. The module syntax works, although I prefer to group export declarations in a separate export or provide block.<p>I think the pattern matching is insufficiently powerful. Normally, pattern matching lets you declare variables as part of the pattern, so that it becomes a kind of switch on the different ways to deconstruct the input. I have an example of what I mean here: <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/f1ycatas/2/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;f1ycatas&#x2F;2&#x2F;</a> . Matching the value of an existing variable could be done with syntax like `== n`.

Ladies and gentlemen we already have TypeScript, Dart, clojurescript, scalajs, coffeescript, PureScript, elm, etc. More innovation in the web language ecosystem is not what is lacking. What is lacking is all the boring stuff like a sensible package management system, deployment mechanism, framework interoperability, etc. You know, all the un-sexy stuff that actual engineering requires.

I love almost everything about this and dislike only a few things:<p>As k__ pointed I see no point in including semicolons, if you already have parenthesis that can be used to delimit expressions and newline characters, why include &quot;;&quot; ?<p>Another thing that I don&#x27;t like is how the language is encourages type weakness in circumstances that normally lead to a dozen pointless bugs in my software during the development process:<p><pre><code> a = -1 if a { &#x2F;&#x2F; Actually meant a &gt; 0 console.log(&quot;In if&quot;); } </code></pre> This could be avoided if languages didn&#x27;t implicitly convert int, float etc values into boolean in the conditional expression of if. The result wouldn&#x27;t even need a lot more code<p><pre><code> if Boolean(a) { </code></pre> That would probably require more code to implement into Spider in sections that might be performance critical. CG coders love to use those binary shortcuts in their code.

isn&#x27;t the fizzbuzz example bugged? Unless the language automatically identifies the most specific pattern I think the case [0, 0] should be the first?<p>EDIT: if it _does_ identify the most specific case, I think it&#x27;s worth pointing out.

Is this a brand new language or more like Coffeescript (something that makes Javascript look nicer)? Either is fine I just couldn&#x27;t tell from the post.

&quot;brand new language to avoid JavaScript’s bad side while embracing its good side.&quot;<p>Why don&#x27;t just use the good side? Well, with all the tools available for JavaScript - static code analysers, type checkers and code coverage tools, is it really _that_ hard to just write this damn code without introducing a new language?

&gt; takes the best ideas of ... Python ... CoffeeScript<p>&gt; still got curly braces and semicola

Any thought of doing a sweetjs implementation so I can compose Spider with other Javascript language extension (e.g. inline JSX templates)

Nice one Alon. Still amazed at your development pace. Keep it up, buddy.

Finally a language that targets ES5&#x2F;6 that I can use!

Looks so cool! I&#x27;ll give it a try

I don&#x27;t want to disencourage good initiatives and experiments, but if is not a technology that creates a &quot;space&quot; where &quot;Everything is a..&quot; then I won&#x27;t be excited because is not going to be paradigmatic by design.<p>When &quot;Everything is a..&quot; you&#x27;re forced to do a lot with little and that&#x27;s really powerful. And creates a paradigm.<p>Some examples of it:<p>LISP: &quot;Everything is an Expression&quot; Haskell and Miranda: &quot;Everything is a Function&quot; Self and Smalltalk: &quot;Everything is an Object&quot;