In Kotlin novices get puzzled by things like `!!` ...

# random

[elizarov]

In Kotlin novices get puzzled by things like !! because it is not common and cannot be read. Avoiding notation altogether and going all English is utopia, though. You need some notation.

[Shawn]

did you mean “going all English is not utopia” here?

[ValV]

I think it means exactly utopia -- write everything in English (avoiding !! and so on)

[Shawn]

I ask because he presents a seemingly contradicting clause after, “You need some”

[Shawn]

Avoiding notation altogether and going all English isn’t utopia, though. You need some [symbols].

[ValV]

I thought is was > You need some [English].

[Shawn]

if “going all English” is utopia, why would you need to supplement it with “You need some English”?

[ValV]

Huh, here it is -- ambiguity of the natural language

[Shawn]

Human language rarely involves context-free grammars. Cribbing tokens from it is not tantamount to introducing the same kind of ambiguity to whatever language you put said tokens into.

[ValV]

@Shawn here I did not understand, what did you mean with cribbing tokens. Since I'm not native English speaker, some things are hard to understand

[Shawn]

but i mean you can google it

[Shawn]

I didn’t say >>= <=>

[Shawn]

much easier to ask about one rather than the other

[ValV]

Totally confused ☹️

[Shawn]

My point is that using terms that are already part of an existing lexicon that you have some context for is much more intuitive than using new amalgams of symbols to express concepts, especially when said new amalgams don’t have intuitive names

[Shawn]

just because someone might be unfamiliar with the the term “mutability” doesn’t mean it’s just as bad as representing an abstract concept as a symbol would be

[Shawn]

same with the word cribbing - the name of the word in question is literally the word itself, so you can ask someone, say, in real life, “what does ‘cribbing’ mean, in this context” and you’ll likely get an answer, or at least be able to more easily deduce what the word might mean, based on how it was used in a sentence

[Shawn]

it’s like type inference, but for parts of speech

[ValV]

Sorry, I'm feeling myself bad, when I have to extract meaning from a long English sentence (I'm loosing relation between words without proper morphology)

[Shawn]

put another way, “to crib” is another way of saying “borrow from”

[Shawn]

borrowing “if/else” to put into Kotlin doesn’t mean Kotlin is somehow as ambiguous as English is

[ValV]

Ah, I thought you mean borrowing tokens from a language into the sentence about utopia 😂

[ValV]

Such [token] as "you need some"

[Shawn]

I see