> the variable has to be given a meaningful name, which is annoying
Not naming the variable is annoying to everyone except the original programmer. Variable names are a feature of existing code.
munk-a 27 days ago [-]
Honestly - even arbitrary variable names are more to my liking than positional references. LOC tends to be an extremely unstable thing to reference and would make refactoring a royal pain.
tomsmeding 27 days ago [-]
They argue that this is not a problem because the IDE automatically renumbers cell references.
Yes, we definitely need more textual (yes, SPL is textual IMO) languages that cannot be sensibly edited without the official IDE. (I'll make an exception for actually visual programming languages, because we don't have a good interoperable format for those.)
hnlmorg 27 days ago [-]
Yeah, I thought that was a rather strange argument too. I mean, there have been occasions when I’ve spent more time pontificating over the naming conventions inside a function than I have writing that function. But that’s been long lasting functions that needed to be easy for others to read. Calling the lack of variable naming “feature” is just weird.
sidpatil 27 days ago [-]
Interesting that they avoided mentioning the term "spreadsheet" entirely.
kragen 27 days ago [-]
yeah, i'd think the way to write this page would be to lead off with how exactly it's similar to and different from libreoffice calc or some other spreadsheet people are familiar with. instead they explain the similarities as if it's 01977 and the audience has never used a spreadsheet. if there are differences, i gave up on reading before i got to them
hnlmorg 27 days ago [-]
I’m glad you posted this because I assumed they were using Excel or LibreOffice. Because of the way they’d written that article, it hadn’t even occurred to me they weren’t using a spreadsheet.
kragen 27 days ago [-]
i think they are, it's just that the spreadsheet they're using is one they wrote themselves
munk-a 27 days ago [-]
Just as a note on naming - the namespace of SPL is already incredibly overloaded so the searchability will be quite poor. It's used (IMO misguidedly) by Splunk and has an older meaning in "System Programming Language" which used to be a pretty wide term to cover any architecture specific functionality activated by library from higher language (i.e. C) or directly through assembly.
Granted, amusingly enough, for a language that specifically tries to account for the difficulty in naming variables, it is extremely fitting that the language is, itself, poorly named.
tomsmeding 27 days ago [-]
For disappointed readers expecting a language that actually works in a grid, the original 2D programming language, Befunge: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge
Not naming the variable is annoying to everyone except the original programmer. Variable names are a feature of existing code.
Yes, we definitely need more textual (yes, SPL is textual IMO) languages that cannot be sensibly edited without the official IDE. (I'll make an exception for actually visual programming languages, because we don't have a good interoperable format for those.)
Granted, amusingly enough, for a language that specifically tries to account for the difficulty in naming variables, it is extremely fitting that the language is, itself, poorly named.
There are more, such as ><> https://esolangs.org/wiki/Fish and MarioLANG https://esolangs.org/wiki/MarioLANG .