> Maybe you are right, but it’s not your place, as a language designer, to dictate that.
I disagree with Evan on this question and many others, but I just don't understand your criticism here. That seems like exactly a language designer's place? Someone needs to decide how the language is tokenized, what counts as a valid variable name, and so on. Very few languages have the answer "everything not explicitly used for something else is okay in variable names". (And Elm does use the ' character for other things, the rule which would allow ' would allow many many other things.)
Maybe you mean he should have made a decision and stuck with it? But that would severely limit exploration.
Is your hypothetical that Bjarne Stroustroup tries to do that now, when C++ is 35 years old and ISO certified? That doesn't seem a close match with Elm, which is less than nine years old and not yet on version 1.
> Maybe you mean he should have made a decision and stuck with it? But that would severely limit exploration
Yes that’s what I meant. That’s what one should do if they want to be taken seriously. I assume you are a software engineer? Do you build APIs for other teams? How well an argument like this(I changed the whole API so I don’t limit exploration) would fly with the rest of the teams in your company.
> That doesn't seem a close match with Elm, which is less than nine years old and not yet on version 1
Yeah, when everything else fails, that’s the only argument left. But this is like saying to not take it seriously and don’t try to use it on anything else other than experiments. Which is not how they try to promote Elm.
I believe, based on my experience, this is just an excuse. And I am afraid that after v 1.0 when he will want to make the similar changes he will just name it v2.0 and have another excuse.
Maybe for you it’s good enough, but for me it’s not. He lost all good faith with me and that’s the reason I don’t use it and recommend others to do the same.
PS: sorry for being negative and apologize if I offended you with my criticism
I disagree with Evan on this question and many others, but I just don't understand your criticism here. That seems like exactly a language designer's place? Someone needs to decide how the language is tokenized, what counts as a valid variable name, and so on. Very few languages have the answer "everything not explicitly used for something else is okay in variable names". (And Elm does use the ' character for other things, the rule which would allow ' would allow many many other things.)
Maybe you mean he should have made a decision and stuck with it? But that would severely limit exploration.
Is your hypothetical that Bjarne Stroustroup tries to do that now, when C++ is 35 years old and ISO certified? That doesn't seem a close match with Elm, which is less than nine years old and not yet on version 1.