Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yoyohello13 997 days ago
This is actually pretty neat. But I'm having a hard time understanding how to ergonomically write with glyphs. What's the intended workflow. Remembering a bunch of shortcuts to get ⌕ instead of just typing `find` seems harder to read and write.

Edit: I think I understand from the language tour. You're supposed to write the ascii names like `find` then running the program converts built-ins to glyphs.

4 comments

It's basically "the auto-formatter takes care of it, and integrated highlighting makes it easy to remember what each glyph does until it's memorized". Imagine if gofmt or prettier actually replaced built-in function names.
Also, the editor in the language has an expandable dedicated glyph panel (click the "Show Glyphs" or "Hide Glyphs" button on the upper right; on the front page it is expanded by default in the top example and the Pad editor page but then hidden on the rest of the embeds).

That glyph panel is pretty neat because it also serves as a language reference and you can ctrl+click into the documentation pages.

Other way would be to have a dedicated keyboard
Why not just use a compiler then? Is a glyph, in the way it is used here, the same as a bytecode?