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by ivoras 1142 days ago
Neat but... Someone will make a crummier version of this in a language which doesn't feature parts looking like Unicode white noise and the original authors will be frustrated why the crummier vetsion took off and their project didn't.

Not every idea deserves to have an esoteric language attached to it to work.
4 comments
fernmyth 1142 days ago
The funny Unicode symbols are actually ASCII `->` and `|>` rendered in a font with ligatures. I agree it's a bit jarring to see, but you wouldn't need a special keyboard.
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detrites 1141 days ago
This really should be mentioned on the page. My first impression was: "well, however cool this is, I will never use it because I can't just type it in any terminal without creating some stupid bespoke environment for it".

EDIT: I just copied and pasted a code example into a text window and the raw typed text is exposed. Maybe something like a suggestion to do that could be included for anyone flummoxed by the symbols?

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surprisetalk 1142 days ago
The font is Fira Code for anybody interested!
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beeburrt 1142 days ago
JetBrains Mono does that ligature `|>` in my Elixir code. I like it :)
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andyferris 1142 days ago
Ohh… totally missed that!
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unwind 1141 days ago
Yeah, the language and ideas are so cool they're nearly a whoosh for my old brain. But I will never understand why anyone would go out of their way to present a programming language while obscuring how you actually type it.

I had to copy-paste the "weird-looking play-symbol" (|>) into a text editor to see if it really was what I thought it was [1], after noticing that selecting it with the mouse split it in half. That is highly distracting from the message, at least to me.

[1]: It was.

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alwillis 1141 days ago
I’ve been using fonts with ligatures for esoteric languages like CSS and HTML for years. ;-)

Seriously, fonts that coders tend to use have included ligatures for quite a few years. For me, it’s less visual noise and a cleaner look.

I use Vim/Neovim and WezTerm but there are many combinations of editors and terminal emulators that support ligatures.

And many programmers fonts: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts

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runlaszlorun 1141 days ago
I’ve been working on a crummier version. So crummy it will likely never make it to a v0.1… :)
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