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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

That looks like mind-numbing garbage that should be kept out of the reach of children.

Why, exactly? Because it appears too dumbed down for us experienced programmers, or is there a deeper reason? The Quorum team, which I'm proud to collaborate with when I have the chance, has evidence that their language works for beginners. They've been collecting that evidence over several years. I think their work deserves more than a shallow dismissal.

All those type declarations, just yuck. In like the third tutorial page we learn about some cast() thing. This dialect of Fortran prepares kids for a world that mostly no longer exists.

> This dialect of Fortran prepares kids for a world that mostly no longer exists.

This is a weird criticism, learning type declarations will not make someone worse at programming or rot their brain. It's mostly just syntax.

As a point of comparison, Scratch doesn't let you assign object instances to variables. I just can't imagine getting worked up about type declarations in comparison to that.

> for a world that mostly no longer exists.

Also... casting no longer exists? I still do explicit casting in JS on occasion, and it certainly comes up in C-like languages. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Rust even has implicit type coercion at all.

Pardon me; if your goal is to prepare kids to be software engineers working in C-like languages and Rust, then that may be just the thing.

11 year old me would have hated it.

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