So personally, I don't want extremely accurate suggestions in the core of
Clojure. Why? Because I think they will never go far enough and I have a
ton of features I want to see that can't (shouldn't) be in the core of a
language.
I'll never forget the first undefined symbol I got in Clang after switching
from GCC. When I say "undefined local 'val' did you mean 'vals'?". I was
floored, what was this magic?
When I sit down and write a laundry list of things I would like to see in
error reporting for spec:
- Spelling suggestions: "did you mean :require instead of :requir?"
- Type suggestions: "you passed a symbol did you want a keyword?"
- Phonetic suggestions: "you passed :color, did you mean :colour?"
- Structural suggestions: "you passed [[42]] did you mean [42]?"
Most (all) of these are way too broad for inclusion in the core of a
language (imo), not to mention the problems you'd hit with multi-lingual
support. So I say to all that, give me data and let 3rd parties write the
libraries. I'd much rather have a 200MB "error reporter" lib in my
{:profiles {:dev ...}} than included in the clojure.jar.
Anyway, that's my 2cents. And if someone doesn't write that library for me
soon, I may have to :)
Timothy
On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 7:47 AM, Brian Marick <mar...@roundingpegs.com>
wrote:
>
> On Aug 22, 2016, at 7:50 PM, Alex Miller <a...@puredanger.com> wrote:
>
>
> You've complained in other channels about the "learning to read" error
> messages part and I think you've taken it entirely the wrong way or maybe I
> just disagree. There are benefits from reporting errors in a generic,
> consistent way. […]
>
>
> Do there exist examples of what is desired for error messages in
> 1.9-final? Not promises, but a “this is what we’re shooting for”? What
> would you all like the specific error messages complained about in this
> thread to look like?
>
> Colin Fleming wrote: "The error message produced by the code I demoed at
> the conj last year would be:
>
> Unexpected symbol 'require' at <exact error location> while parsing
> namespace clauses. Expected :refer-clojure, :require, :use, :import, :load
> or :gen-class.”
>
> Is that the goal? I fear that the goal is that it should be my job to
> understand "(cat :attr-map (? map?) :clauses :clojure.core.specs/ns-clauses)”.
> For what little it’s worth, I consider that completely unacceptable.
>
> - Getting the error data (specifically the explain-data output) to be both
> sufficient and generically useful is the first priority. I think at this
> point that's pretty close and unlikely to change significantly.
>
>
> My bias here is that I come from the learned-from-bitter-experience
> tradition that believes it’s very risky to (1) get the infrastructure
> right, and then (2) pop down the user-visible features on top of it. Very
> often, the infrastructure turns out to be a poor match for the actual needs
> of the features. But, since (1) is already done, the features - and
> consequently the users - suffer.
>
> Please understand I’m not being insulting when I say that everyone has
> weaknesses and blind spots, even undoubted geniuses. In Clojure, error
> messages and documentation (especially doc strings) have long been glaring
> weaknesses. So I am wishing to be helpful when I counsel *quickly* getting
> to worked examples of output, especially output that novices are likely to
> encounter. And exposing those messages to typical users, ones who are not
> familiar with core.spec.
>
> That seems prudent.
>
> I believe strongly enough in good error messages that I would be willing
> to do some of the scut work, if needed.
>
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--
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zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
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