Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm fairly sure the author was making reference to the famous article What Color Are Your Bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 which is even more abstract, because some large numbers are coloured "legal" and the same large numbers are coloured "illegal", based on where you got the numbers from.

All functions are not coloured, don't try to wriggle out of it by generalising. This article is a specific complaint about Javascript. Javascript is a hack on top of a hack. Its async/await is crap. Javascript requires this "colouring" in a way that C#, Java, Go, Python, Ruby, C, C++, Rust, etc. don't, because they don't have to pretend they're a single-threaded event processing loop, while Javascript does.

I haven't used python recently, but in the days of asyncio it was very much "painful" (to borrow the article's verbage) to use, precisely because of the five criteria in the article.

Painfulness isn't the main issue with colored functions, it only explains why we don't make every function red (async).

The main issue is that sync functions can't call async functions, but in Python, you can bypass that restriction with asyncio.run.

Fta

4) Red functions are more painful to call

I guess for me if I reach back to my memory my real problem with asyncio was that it used decorators and wrapping my head around how it was a crazy abuse of generators, completely broke my internal model of how python works (and also how at the time debugging became problematic), and maybe not so much the ergonomics, so strictly speaking a different set of ergonomic problems than in the colored function article

Agreed. Every time this article makes the rounds, people get hung up on the syntax, and not the performance considerations discussed towards the end. Nystrom wrote a whole book on interpreters, and his main criticism here is the big mess of chained closures this makes at runtime, compared with pausing/resuming green threads.

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