> Lil has a soft, spongy, dynamic type system in which values do their best to convert to a more relevant type as the need arises.
Noooooo, this is a terrible idea if you want this to be used at any non-trivial scale
Noooooo, this is a terrible idea if you want this to be used at any non-trivial scale
Lil is designed for an interesting, if a bit retro, reboot of HyperCard. The fantastic thing about HyperCard was the ability for a user to just... change stuff.
In a HyperCard system, users become developers whenever they want to.
They're going to make mistakes. A lot of mistakes. Mistakes you and I, as developers, won't understand.
What should the runtime do? Not break. "Attempt to index a nil value" is a cruel thing to tell someone who is trying to create a dictionary.
What this does: "oh, you're trying to index this value? Ok, it's an empty dictionary now". "Oh, you're trying to sort it into a drop-down list? Empty string, nothing happens".
HyperCard scale isn't dozens of developers working on a cadence, with branches and merge reviews. HyperCard scale is someone making something really cool, and dozens, maybe hundreds, of personalizations. Some shared, some not.
The distinction between, say, adding photos to a gallery, and adding a photo editor to the stack, is not sharp in HyperCard.
I'm very pleased to see this project, although I think the retro aesthetic might be self-limiting at some point. The loss of HyperCard was a real one, we're suffering from it to this day.
Perhaps have a switch that can enables stronger type checking.
I'm generally positive about restricting undefined behavior at a lower level (syntax, undefined field accesses, etc), but at a higher level (writing large scale applications, using it outside of intended domains, etc) it's not very clear how and even if you should restrict unintended usage.
The more room you have for "undefined behavior" at a higher level, the more people can explore using a tool in various ways you never thought about. This can in turn be valuable feedback on possible directions to expand your tool in.