Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by desdiv 3321 days ago
Here's my straw-man proposal:

Allow both indentation-based and bracket-based syntax. Have a tool like scalafmt/goformat that freely converts between the two on a per-file and per-project basis.

When you're writing your own code, use the indentation-based syntax. You can paste in bracket-based code anywhere, hit the auto-format key on your IDE or run the commandline formatter and everything becomes nice and indentation-based.

When you're writing books, libraries, example projects, SO posts, use the bracket-based syntax. That way people who read your book/library source/example/SO post can freely copy and paste into their own projects.

This has minimal impact on bracket-based syntax diehards; everything they read and write stays the same. They won't even see the new syntax if they don't want to.