I've never seen a language add a full-featured REPL later in its life. It's incredibly hard to add "update function definition" interactively.
Clojure is an interesting case. It was developed with a REPL in mind, but the JVM was not. Perhaps the VM matters less here?
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I'm changing method definition syntax in my language:
// old
fun (this: Int) inc(): Int { this + 1 }
// new
method inc(this: Int): Int { this + 1 }
The original syntax was inspired by Go, but the new syntax is more grep-friendly and perhaps more readable. Not sure about the verbosity though. Thoughts?
There are *so many* ways that reading a text file can fail.
Maybe it doesn't exist, it's a broken symlink, it's actually a directory, it's not the encoding you expected, or perhaps you just don't have the correct permissions.
Reporting good errors is surprisingly labour intensive.
`init` feels like an unhelpful name in OO. It doesn't give you an initial value, it initialises the instance that has already been created. Developers are often surprised that init doesn't return the instance, because they have a strong association with `new Foo()`.
Perhaps `finish` would have been a less confusing name?