Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Please elaborate!


The proposal is to introduce a whole slew of syntax to JS that according to the proposal will have no meaning. This is a paradox. You have only created a language if you can use it to convey meaning


That's not entirely true. Ideally, there would be a follow up with a reflection API.

Also, comments are syntax and they're mostly meaningless. By your reasoning, programming languages should have no comments.

So, it's not really a qualitative issue (presence of meaningless syntax) but a quantitative one (presence of lots of parsing complexity).


If you say that whatever data is put there doesn't matter at all, the one thing you definitely cannot ever do later is give it meaning.


Unless I say it's meaning is to be optionally reflected upon during runtime!

Look, I understand the purism and mostly, I agree. But this is not a clean slate language, it will never be perfect and it's going to become more and more idiosyncratic as times go by.


I don't see how it's optional.

Comments are a kind of freedom in code. You're completely free to use them precisely because (in a plain execution environment) they cannot influence the result of evaluation

If comments /can/ change the result of evaluation then you simply are not (completely) free to use them. (And yes I know that this is a simplification in JS where you can already get the source code of a function with toString... Ugh)


Makes sense. I'm excited for your solution, despite not having seen it. If you can solve that, it would be awesome.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: