Dear Simon,
I did comment on it[1], I also agree with Malte that this proposal could indeed use more guidance from us.
Fundamentally I like all (now) three proposals. I find it a bit challenging to see the full picture, especially
around the ergonomics of these, without actually using them for a while actually trying to solve problems.
I wish we had a staging/preview area where we could permit such proposals to be given a trial run for a
limited time to collect feedback from actually using them.
As I've mentioned in the comment, I do think Bodigrim has a point with his concern about towering
abstraction. What might be helpful to some in _some_ domain, might not be helpful to me in a different
domain. We have lots of language extensions already to cater to specific domains, and sometimes it's
best to use as few extensions as possible, writing very straight forward code, which is also easy to read
for others. In other scenarios skilled application of language extensions allows the author to model the
problem much clearer. However, do I want this always enabled? Most likely not.
My primary concern is always: will this break existing code, as a language extension behind a language
pragma gate, I'm not very concerned about this.
My secondary concern is that as mentioned above, we build locally optimised languages for sub problems.
I don't think this is necessarily wrong, ghc haskell has this already in its dna, but for newcomers this
can be confusing. They don't deal with one, but multiple languages concurrently.
I personally find most of the ceremonies needed around strings, numbers, (and lists) quite unsatisfactory,
hence these proposals do appeal to me. Then again my reservation are mostly around the increasing
complexity of the sublanguages, and uncertainty if I would actually end up using them down the line?
I wish I could just have them at my disposal for a while to try out and experiment with, knowing full well
that they might change, or be removed, to get a better feeling for how well they actually help with
coding problems I have at hand, and if the ergonomics work out for me or not.
This ended up being a lot longer than I intended it to be, oh well...
Best,