I can kind of understand it. If it's a first class part of the language, then it... | Hacker News

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recursive on July 2, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Go is boring, and that’s fantastic

I can kind of understand it. If it's a first class part of the language, then it's never going to get painted into an ugly corner.

As a nearly related example, the LESS css pre-processor language was developed prior to `calc()` expressions. As a result, the LESS language parses arithmetic expressions. So `calc(10em + 10px)` compiles to `calc(20em)`. So in order to do `calc()` expressions, you have to use nasty hacks like `calc(10em ~"+" 10px)`. If LESS "shipped" with CSS, this wouldn't have happened.

leetrout on July 2, 2020 [–]

I see your point. I think that's a little apples-to-oranges because LESS transpiled to CSS - it wasn't a formatter for CSS.

recursive on July 2, 2020 | [–]

In the analogy, there may be a new language feature that breaks assumptions made by a 3rd party code formatter.

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