Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

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It actually seems to default to immutability, and have mutability as a first-class citizen with the language annotation `variable`: http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.0/tour/attributes-con...

I'm not sure if it's quite as flexible as C++'s const-correctness, but if you're creating your own class hierarchy from scratch, you can (and are encouraged to) code in a style that basically ensures that every parameter is practically passed as a const (immutable) reference. So you can easily do things like make strongly-typed functional data structures that will compiler-complain if you try to modify them after creation, without needing to remember to type "const" all the time. And that's realistically what most people need at the end of the day.

I'm excited to experiment with this - it seems definitely designed by pragmatists who want to lower the barrier to entry and make it fun for non-functional programmers to code in (I'm looking at you, Haskell), but also encouraging and enforcing best practices wherever possible.

When I wrote my comment, I was actually looking at how variables inside a method are declared, not fields (attributes, as they call it in this language) like you mention (seems like the 'variable' keyword is not for local variables, but for attributes).

So I was mainly hoping it is like F#, that forces you to decorate non-immutable variables with the `mutable` keyword, inside a method/function.

However, thinking about it more deeply, this is not so important. Because local variables (in a method) are never shared between threads. So immutability doesn't suffer from them being mutable. Right?

Probably right. One of the Rust developers suggested something similar (but more nuanced, because Rust is a highly nuantial language):

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/05/13/focu...

"Put another way, it’s become clear to me over time that the problems with data races and memory safety arise when you have both aliasing and mutability. The functional approach to solving this problem is to remove mutability. Rust’s approach would be to remove aliasing."

Local variables themselves are naturally non-aliased, although the objects they point to might be.

PS apologies to anyone who's seen it before for trotting that link out yet again!

In Ceylon even local variables must be explicitly annotated `variable`.

The reason for that is that a local variable could be captured by an anonymous function or nested function, and escape from the local scope, so it's exactly the same situation with a local variable as for an instance variable of a class: both kinds of variable break referential transparency.

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