I wonder if people dislike "syntactic sugar" partially because the name contains an implied presupposition that it's bad to use personally I love it, but that's just from my limited C# perspective so idk - ThreadSky

freya.bsky.social • 15 days ago

I wonder if people dislike "syntactic sugar" partially because the name contains an implied presupposition that it's bad to use

personally I love it, but that's just from my limited C# perspective so idk

Comments

bgmeister.bsky.social•15 days ago

I guess it adds complexity over time, since there are more and more ways to write code that does the same thing. Like everything else there are pros and cons

sheis.apparently.gay•15 days ago

I've liked syntactic sugar in some languages and hated it in others. With C# I generally liked what sugar exists (for goodness sakes async/await is entirely sugar over Promises) EXCEPT for the oooold linq to SQL.

With Scala, on the other hand, everything is so heavily sugared I became diabetic IRL.

zeliotl.bsky.social•15 days ago

why is it called syntactic sugar? thought you were talking about sweeteners until you mentioned C#

tesseralis.site•15 days ago

maybe we’ll have better luck if we call it syntactic stevia

ravind.ooo•15 days ago

syntactic spinach

fool.dev•15 days ago

syntactic msg

moaid.bsky.social•15 days ago

Most of C#'s most popular features are Syntactic Sugar.
Records, Pattern Matching, Properties, Elvis Operator, Collection Expressions, Extension Methods, Collection Initializers, Indices and Ranges, String interpolation, a lot more.
That's why they can innovate in a rapid pace. No Runtime changes.

hjvt.dev•15 days ago

Some ascets prefer suffering, of course, but I don't think people generally dislike syntax sugar, and neither does the phrase have that bad of a connotation. There is a bit of "it's not a real feature, it's just sugar sprinkled over the basics" attitude towards some features, but ergonomics are neat

smushy64.itch.io•15 days ago

I love good syntax when it's an accurate reflection of what the compiler will generate. Unfortunately, they're often bad abstractions that ultimately don't deliver easier readability or code gen

phalanxhead.bsky.social•15 days ago

Partially - I think there is a decent argument that it can make some code a bit more… unapproachable for juniors?

And ofc, you can go overboard and end up with whatever Haskell nerds seem to do

mstallmo.com•15 days ago

My personal trepidation has always come from the addition of syntactic sugar creating multiple ways to express the same thing.

It’s not a bad thing per-se but it can create extra friction when using a language

bluephoenixalex.bsky.social•15 days ago

As someone who started in c# and is now in the throes of c++, syntactic sugar like c#'s getter/setter syntax on properties is one of the things I miss the most

bushr.at•15 days ago

"Sugar" is anything I'm smart enough to understand how to implement on my own. I do think it's a pretty subjective term designed to diminish the skills of others...

johnthecoolingfan.bsky.social•15 days ago

Depends on how you define syntactic sugar. Because one could argue that a programming language is just syntactic sugar for machine code.

Personally - if it fits into the language, doesn't introduce too many footguns and makes sense - it's fine.

deefdragon.deef.tech•15 days ago

Syntactic sugar is like sugar in coffee or tea. It's OK on its own, but quite improved with sugar. Add too much sugar however (both overuse or too many types of it) and you end up with something that is rather bad.
Go for example, does not have ?: ternary syntax, even tho it improves a lot of code.

deefdragon.deef.tech•15 days ago

The reason for this is apparently because it lead to massive ternary trees that were incredibly difficult to untangle (which I HAVE seen).

I see a similar problem with C++'s Operator overloading. Because of operator overloading, EVERYTHING is done via operators. (why does PRINT require << etc.?)

deefdragon.deef.tech•15 days ago

Because of that overuse of operator overloading, even tho it makes many cases MUCH nicer, overuse has resulted in complexity throughout the language/libs. These issues have become tied to operator overloading itself instead of C++'s over-reliance on them, and why most languages wont add them.

cilethdev.bsky.social•15 days ago

At work, I use many languages and read code in different styles written by different people and need to contextualize quickly to contribute. It's annoying to lookup the specific "sugar" to understand what's going on when it can be written in an agnostic way with no performance hit most of the time

areddan.bsky.social•15 days ago

Even as a mostly systems level programming person, I love it

lutinlyes.bsky.social•15 days ago

As someone currently learning C# from a java/c++ background, "syntactic sugar" makes it sound... special somehow? Like something you should only use once you've learned the "hard way".
It's just a marketing gimmick, call it for what it bloody well is - language specific syntax.

johnthecoolingfan.bsky.social•15 days ago

Isn't most syntax language specific?

Like yeah, you could have a + b mean the same in an overwhelming majority of languages, but also there are languages that might use postfix notation and they write the same thing as a b +.

bread-emoji.bsky.social•15 days ago

I think you can play this game to a point where it gets ridiculous

Like a for loop is just syntactic sugar for a loop around an iterator

gregpotter.me•15 days ago

“Syntactic sugar” is just a funnily abstract term to talk about programming language abstractions.

Like all abstraction, it is only as good or bad as it is useful for your particular purpose.

There’s also a huge cultural/historical aspect to it, and that’s more where the debate tends to happen.

gregpotter.me•15 days ago

E.g. there is a lot of common and pervasive procedural syntax derived from C that we have much more apt syntax options for, but newer major procedural-focused languages, like Rust and Zig, must use that old syntax to become widely used, or else they get shunned for breaking established norms.

baste.bsky.social•15 days ago

It's just an implementation detail on how a language feature works - it's rewritten at a high level (the language itself) to implement whatever it is. foreach => GetEnumerator() + while moveNext() etc. So declaring that things implemented like that is good/bad is just silly!

runevision.bsky.social•15 days ago

I think syntactic sugar has a more specific meaning in .NET than in many other languages. It’s features that can be implemented without changing the Common Language Runtime. I like them and have one specific in mind I wish would be added (it worked in UnityScript): Setting a struct prop variable.

khyperia.bsky.social•15 days ago

I'm just curious, what do you mean by "setting a struct prop variable"?

runevision.bsky.social•15 days ago

I mean this, which doesn't work in C# but did in UnityScript:
myTransform.position.y = 5;

Here position is a struct property and y is a variable of that struct. Have to do this, which is infuriating to me:

var pos = myTransform.position;
pos.y = 5;
myTransform.position = pos;

tomforsyth.bsky.social•15 days ago

This has tripped me up so many times. Absolute "fuck you" from the language designers. It compiles just fine, but does nothing.

pedrothedagger.bsky.social•15 days ago

I feel like creating what purports to be a C family successor that works like that is some kind of deep programming language crime

tomforsyth.bsky.social•15 days ago

Principle of most excellent surprise. You can stare at that code forever and not figure out the problem. Everybody is fired.

khyperia.bsky.social•15 days ago

compiles just fine? huh?

tomforsyth.bsky.social•15 days ago

Aren't you lucky. Want to come over and update all our compilers?

khyperia.bsky.social•15 days ago

aah right, catching up now - the reason this is topical to the thread is that I'm guessing UnityScript has syntax sugar to rewrite what the code is actually doing to the "expanded" version at the bottom of your tweet?

khyperia.bsky.social•15 days ago

but yeah, unfortunately I don't think this can come to C#, it'd be a pretty massive breaking change :c

runevision.bsky.social•15 days ago

Why would it be a breaking change to make something that produced a compile error work fine instead? What could it break? (Apart from some unit tests specifically testing that this produces a compile error...)

superrembo.bsky.social•15 days ago

Use a class instead of a struct/record if you want mutability?

runevision.bsky.social•15 days ago

My point is I want it to work for structs too, and it easily could with some syntactic sugar, because it already did many years ago in a different .NET language.

superrembo.bsky.social•15 days ago

But if structs would be mutable, then what's the point of using them?

xiyng.bsky.social•15 days ago

I've never thought of myself as liking or not liking syntactic sugar. However, now that I come to think of it, syntactic sugar might feel a bit like duct tape to overcome potential design issues in the programming language, which isn't all that nice.

echowritescode.bsky.social•15 days ago

for me it depends on the amount and quality of the sugar 😅 C# has a good amount of really well thought out features that i'd call sugar, but Perl for example is full of shortcuts and alternative syntaxes that are a very mixed bag. it's hard to write "clean" Perl specifically because of this imo

dragoonaethis.bsky.social•15 days ago

Depends on whose syntactic sugar it is. C#, Python? Love it. Ruby, Groovy? Nejjjj

gondera.ge•15 days ago

In my experience, it's sometimes toxic weirdos who like to bikeshed. For example, the proposal for list comprehension in GDscript in both Godot and Redot have the same weirdo fiercely pushing back, because it's not C-like or too Pythonic. Godot closed the proposal while it's in limbo for Redot.

gondera.ge•15 days ago

Also, there's the "ermmmm that'll be hard for noobs" argument, which I can get, but counterpoint: noobs can learn. Signals are already hard to grasp for some people, I was helping someone with that recently, but we have signals anyway! Them n00bz gon' learn!!!!

jacopobertolotti.com•15 days ago

As a noob who struggles to understand the logic behind signals in Godot: if you (not you i particular, impersonal "you") explain stuff clearly noobs will learn. But if you just give them a piece of code to copy with ever explaining the underlying logic, they will keep struggling.

sadtofu.bsky.social•15 days ago

Also a huge fan. Every time I type private record struct I know today is gonna be a banger.

Also the new switch expressions are just gorgeous.

urbanowicz.bsky.social•15 days ago

Last time I saw people worrying about syntactic sugar was when Java announced lambda expressions (or when everyone discussed type aliases in various languages). What is it this time?

prso.works•15 days ago

I'm fine with it in most cases but there are some environments (e.g. Kotlin) where it feels like the language lacks set rules and devolves into magic.

hyperupcall.bsky.social•15 days ago

Hmm, I didn't know about that perspective, even though I prefer savory foods! I like them as long as they're easy to remember and used frequently

wuutguy.bsky.social•15 days ago

I love syntactic sugar! Who doesn't like it?

I dislike - what I call - "attribute programming;" when a bunch of functionality is added from a [...] on a property or method.

fuchsium.bsky.social•15 days ago

have you tried kotlin?

loranjohn.bsky.social•15 days ago

I don't like it because it forces me to research the syntax. The best code is boring code - it does what you intend it to do & does not make it an issue for those who maintain your code. I've been involved in large projects programming in C,C++,C#, Javascript, VB, HTML, CSS & we always use patterns

mcy.gay•15 days ago

variables are syntax sugar for machine register, pointers are syntax sugar for memory addresses. it's all subjective.

mcy.gay•15 days ago

machine registers* fml

applimu.bsky.social•15 days ago

Syntactic sugar is very cool and useful in haskell and lean!!

mtmilo.net•15 days ago

I love it, we have a bunch of language featurea that make for clean, easy to read code

alltalk.bsky.social•15 days ago

Syntactic sugar are like big words. They can be used to express the same idea more clearly and concisely... if the reader knows them. Whether or not they are bad to use depends on the audience.

alltalk.bsky.social•15 days ago

I try to write the most idiomatic code I can if others have to read it.

But my personal code...

luckylights.bsky.social•15 days ago

If you think about it, all of programming langs are just syntactic sugar.

Sugar is just one more layer of abstraction, on what the lang already abstracted.

Abstraction is always complicated sugar or not. And all of programming is abstraction

matesrsen.bsky.social•15 days ago

I've always perceived 'sugar' as a value-neutral descriptor. In a certain sense just about every element of every language is sugar - the only way to truly avoid sugar is to manually type in machine code with a hex editor, and even then the hex representation can be considered sugar over the binary.

sharundaar.bsky.social•15 days ago

I think it's more about hidden behavior, like C++ has a lot of syntactic sugar things now, but if you check the disassembly it's rarely 0-cost... And even without talking about perfs sometimes it just behaves weirdly in specific circumstances (leaky abstraction stuff)

moppius.bsky.social•15 days ago

syntactic salt
syntactic fat
syntactic acid
syntactic heat

frzpop.bsky.social•15 days ago

Syntactic umami

gondera.ge•15 days ago

syntactic trans fats

santaoro.bsky.social•15 days ago

Yeah, along the lines of 'everything is a wrapper'- we always create 'developer experience'. That's also a goal (not just the user facing product).
The importance of unwanted side-effects depends on the use case.

nothayley.bsky.social•15 days ago

idk, i think of it more like decorative icing

gurtha.bsky.social•15 days ago

Most people I've ran across that dislike it, say that it partially obfuscates or is "needlessly" simplifying what ever it's being applied to.

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