Ask HN: Is there any programming language that doesn't have WTFs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there any programming language that doesn't have WTFs?

5 pointsbehnamoh6 comments

After reading this page:

https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython?tab=readme-ov-file#-needles-in-a-haystack-

I wonder if there's any language that thought about all edge cases and avoided exceptions and such gotchas at the design level.

JS is notorious for such WTFs but even Python—which I've used for over a decade now—has surprised me countless times.

Is Haskell also like that? How about Lisps (CL, Racket, Clojure, Scheme, etc.)?

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Haskell is relatively WTF free as a language, behaving pretty much like the lambda calculus, but the standard libraries have their share of WTFs, such as the Enum instance for Double:

ghci> [0, 0.3 .. 2.0] [0.0,0.3,0.6,0.8999999999999999,1.2,1.5,1.7999999999999998,2.1]

I'd rather not see 2.1 in a range up to 2.0

That’s floating point, though. Not Double. Floating point has the same gotchas in all languages because it is a defined standard.

That list is of type (Fractional a, Enum a) => [a], but ghci defaults to Doubles, as you can see from

    ghci>  [0, 0.3 .. 2.0]  :: [Float]
    [0.0,0.3,0.6,0.90000004,1.2,1.5,1.8000001,2.1000001]
    ghci>  [0, 0.3 .. 2.0]  :: [Double]
    [0.0,0.3,0.6,0.8999999999999999,1.2,1.5,1.7999999999999998,2.1]

Exceeding the upper bound by 0.1 is not due to a general floating gotcha, but a specific choice in the definition of typeclass method enumFromThenTo for both Floats and Doubles.

Only highly abstract languages like Brainfuck

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck

which are too simple to have WTFs, although you might say the whole thing is a WTF. I think AVR-8 assembler is WTF free, but I'd like a more powerful macro assembler which would probably introduce a WTF.

Common Lisp is full of WTFs, I went through many stages of grief reading Graham's On Lisp but most notable was "if he was using Clojure he wouldn't be fighting with nconc". People have problems with Clojure too

https://www.more-magic.net/posts/thoughts-on-clojure.html

For #3 on that list C has that too. And I often use it.

   printf( "thing1=%u\n"
           "thing2=%u\n"
           "thing3=%u\n"
           "thing4=%u\n"
           "thing5=%u\n",
       thing1,
       thing2,
       thing3,
       thing4,
       thing5);

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