[chubot]

Honest question, why have local scopes at all? IIRC, Lox is a dynamic object-oriented language.

Python has a flat scope per function, and closures aren't all that common in idiomatic Python code. Objects are much more common.

JavaScript also had a flat scope per function until ES6. On the other hand, closures are very idiomatic in JavaScript, and objects are a little weak.

Looking at the previous chapter [1], from someone familiar with OOP, the makeCounter and Point examples just seem to be awkward ways of writing classes, no?

Particularly for an educational language, why have two ways of doing the same thing?

[1] http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/functions.html

[munificent]

> Python has a flat scope per function, and closures aren't all that common in idiomatic Python code.

Closures are common in "idiomatic" Lox code. Or, at least, I want Lox to be a language that doesn't have pitfalls around using closures and local variables.

Because Lox is syntactically C-ish, I also think it's important that its scoping rules roughly follow C and friends.

> JavaScript also had a flat scope per function until ES6.

Right, which is evidence that not having local scopes was a mistake. Adding "let" was a very big deal and wouldn't have been done unless the semantics of "var" really were not what users wanted.

I talk a little more about function scope in the context of implicit declaration here:

http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/statements-and-state.htm...

> Looking at the previous chapter [1], from someone familiar with OOP, the makeCounter and Point examples just seem to be awkward ways of writing classes, no? > > Particularly for an educational language, why have two ways of doing the same thing?

I think it's possible to go too far down the rabbit hole when deciding two things are the "same". Since you can implement integers using functions [1] why have both numbers and functions? You can implement control flow using closures and dynamic dispatch, so why have "if" [2]?

The pragmatic answers are:

1. Users probably don't think of functions and classes as "the same" even though only one is required for Turing completeness.

2. Most interpreters do not implement one in terms of the other, so having both lets us show the implementation techniques that are unique to each.

[1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Peano_numbers [2]: https://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Cond...

[chubot]

Are there any examples of the book of closures that couldn't be better written as classes? (Or perhaps you disagree about the Counter/Point examples.)

I'm not sure I agree about "let" being evidence of local scopes being necessary. I believe the primary problem with "var" is the "hoisting" behavior, i.e. roughly speaking code "later" can affect variable references now.

In Python this isn't as big of a deal, because you get an UnboundLocalError for code like this:

    x = 1
    def f(x):
      print(x)
      x = 2
      print(x)

So instead of a silent bug, you'll get a crash, which is easy to debug. In JavaScript I believe similar examples will lead to subtle bugs, which "let" fixes. Also in JS "x = 1" is global but "var x = 1" is local.

-----

"let" also added local scopes, but I don't believe it proves that you needed them. Anecdotally, coming from C/C++ to Python, I've never missed local scopes, simply because I keep my functions small.

Mild tangent: Here is something I realized recently about the perennial large functions vs. small functions debate: It depends on whether you're a C programmer or not.

You can find some documents by John Carmack and Jon Blow arguing for large functions. That's because they are C programmers, and in C there is a very large cost to creating a function: reasoning about ownership/memory management (and the lack of ability to return non-primitives without out-params.) It's easier to keep things all in one function, especially if you're only calling the function in one place.

In Java, JavaScript, and Python, there is no such cost. Garbage collection takes care of it for you. You can return as big an object as you like. And indeed the idiomatic style in those languages is small functions.

So I claim that local scopes are much less necessary in Java, JavaScript, and Python. C doesn't have true functions, which makes local scopes quite useful.

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I understand your point about going overboard making things the same (there was an old Paul Graham post pondering getting rid of integers in his defunct Lisp dialect ARC).

But I think it's a different story for classes and closures. There is obviously an efficiency problem with integers as functions, just like there is an efficiency problem in Haskell with strings being lists of characters. In engineering you obviously care about efficiency.

I know this is programming language heresy, but I honestly don't see a real need for closures if you have classes. (And if you have the Dart-like or Wren-like constructor initialization shortcuts for classes, which I plan to add to the language I'm designing.)

I'm sure I'm biased because I'm coming from C and Python, and neither really has closures. (Python didn't have the ability to mutate variables in an enclosing scope until the 'nonlocal' keyword was introduced several years ago -- and I've never seen it used in the wild.)

JavaScript is the only language I've really used with closures and I don't use it that often (and Scheme in college, but doesn't really count). I just looked through some JS code of mine, and I pretty much always have an explicit model of the page state and pass it explicitly using a dependency injection style. With closures, state is implicit. I don't like the fact that your outer function can have 8 locals but only 2 of them are captured, and you have to search up to see which ones they are.

There's one use of closures for an onclick handler, but I would solve that with __call__ in Python (C++ also has this as "functors", but Java doesn't).

-----

I also asked a similar question about prototypes vs. classes here [1], which was a pretty good discussion.

I liked the Wren design because it's like JavaScript/Lua but with classes instead of prototypes.

And I liked your red function/green function post about async, which is another important use of closures. And there was a recent Ryan Dahl interview [2] where he admitted that the Go style was better for servers, and conceded the "callback pyramid" problem with closures.

-----

So what's left for closures then? If one agrees that Counter/Point are naturally classes (which you might not), if you want to make an explicit model of state in GUI code (e.g. Elm advocates this strongly), and if you believe in the Go-style async is better, then what are some natural uses of closures? This is an honest question -- as I said I could be biased coming from languages that don't have them.

If closures just "fell out of" implementing classes, I would probably implement them in the language I'm designing. But this chapter shows that there are some non-trivial issues so I'd be inclined to leave them out.

My pet theory is that the industry learned how to use classes "correctly" around 2005 or so. From perhaps 1995 to 2005, you were more likely than not to encounter a mess. (Although Go might be late to the party [3].)

This is another contrarian opinion, but I actually think classes relate more strongly to functional programming than closures (though closures have more of a historical relation). Classes are more rigorous about state (random local vars aren't captured), and functional programming is also about being rigorous about state. I use classes but I think of it like functional-programming-in-the-large [4]. There is a false dichotomy between FP and OOP -- the modern styles of both are converging (explicit state params, dependency injection).

Sorry for the long post -- tl;dr I would like to see some examples of code in the book which are more natural for closures than classes :)

tl;dr #2 -- If you have a short syntax for initializing class members for constructor params, and if you have a way of bridging classes and functions, like __call__/operator(), -- then I claim you don't really need closures.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14415431

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15140669

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14523728

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11841893

[munificent]

> Are there any examples of the book of closures that couldn't be better written as classes?

The book itself doesn't really have a lot of "representative" Lox code since it's so focused on implementing the interpreters themselves. But certainly, in other languages with first-class functions, callbacks are very common and would be painfully cumbersome to do with classes. Note, for example, that Java has long supported anonymous inner classes, but still added lambdas later because the former were so annoying to use in many cases.

> Anecdotally, coming from C/C++ to Python, I've never missed local scopes, because I simply keep my functions small.

C and C++ have local scopes. Would you expect this to not have an error?

    main() {
      for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
        // ...
      }
      printf("%d\n", i); // <-- ?
    }

> in C there is a very large cost to creating a function: reasoning about ownership/memory management (and the lack of ability to return non-primitives without out-params.)

There is also the overhead of the call itself. In the kind of performance-critical code often written in C/C++, that can matter too. Good compilers will inline when it makes sense, but those heuristics aren't perfect.

> I know this is programming language heresy, but I honestly don't see a real need for closures if you have classes.

You don't need them, but once you get used to them, they sure are handy. Implicitly closing over locals in the surrounding scope is a little magical, but it's a really convenient kind of magic than generally seems to help more than it harms.

All the world's Smalltalk, Scheme, C#, Ruby, Dart, Scala, Swift, JavaScript, Kotlin etc. programmers probably aren't wrong in liking them. (Although, as a language designer, it's of course fun and potentially rewarding to deliberately try to get off the beaten path.)

> if you believe in the Go-style async is better, then what are some natural uses of closures? This is an honest question -- as I said I could be biased coming from languages that don't have them.

The bread and butter use cases I see are:

1. Modifying collections. map(), filter(), etc. are so much clearer and more declarative than imperatively transforming a collection.

2. Callbacks for event handlers or the command pattern. (If you're using a framework that isn't event based, this may not come up much.)

3. Wrapping up a bundle of code so that you can defer it, conditionally, execute it, execute it in a certain context, or do stuff before and after it. Python's context stuff handles much of this for you, but then that's another language feature you have to explicitly add.

[chubot]

OK thanks for the answer.

I totally agree with first class functions, and I probably agree with the Python-style ability to read outer variables (especially in the case that the inner call doesn't survive longer than the outer call).

What I don't agree with is capturing locals to rebind them -- this is the explicit vs. implicit state argument.

So for #1 map/filter, I don't really see this as a use case for closures. It's more about function literals and first-class functions.

#2 I am on the fence about... I would be interested in examples. Like I said, with my somewhat limited JS experience, I understand why people like them, but I think you can do OK without mutating the surrounding scope. There's a distinction between calling a mutating method on an object in the surrounding scope, and actually rebinding something in the surrounding scope.

#3 might be convincing although I would need examples. The Go-style defer is scope-based which seems more limited than general closures. Python's context managers are sort of a syntactic sugar/protocol around using certain kinds of classes -- much in the same way that iterators are.

The other problem with closures it's not really one language feature -- they're different across languages. There is more than one issue with capture like the one with loops you mentioned in another comment. And, C++ now has closures, but there are a few different options with regard to LValues and RValues that I don't remember at the moment. It doesn't feel that solid to me, but I'll continue to play with it, and this chapter and some of the comments will certainly help.

On the one hand, it seems like a ton of code has been written in C++, Java, and Python without closures. On the other hand, C++ and Java both added some closure-like features in the last decade, and Python added nonlocal, so that's probably a trend. (But like I said I've never actually seen anyone use nonlocal, it feels like something done "for completeness" rather than based on actual usage.)