[v5.3.2-pre] Peeking at the Conditional Shortcut Syntax

[jeremyruston]

Thanks @Flibbles, and apologies for my delayed response. Your comments are valuable feedback, and I’m delighted to receive them before it’s too late for this release.

I am happy to delay the release for a week to allow for further discussion if enough people think that it is warranted. It would be useful to hear from others who have concerns about this new syntax.

@Flibbles

Why not just have an <$else> widget? Why are we introducing all of this new syntax for something only power users will ever use?

An assumption within the core is that widgets are independent of their siblings. There is no lateral flow of variable values or anything else. I do recognise this as a limitation of the current design. A particular motivation to update the design would be to be able to compute running heading numbers in wikitext.

I know that Evan’s conditional plugin does work laterally in the widget tree, but I think it is brittle, and constrains what we can do with the widget tree.

@Flibbles

And if someone is making a chain of if-else statements, they’re not using Tiddlywiki the way it should be used. It’s about templates, not imperative programming.

I disagree. The core has many instances of the list widget being used for if-then-else logic, and they will all be much clearer once we’ve updated the templates to use the new syntax.

@Flibbles

Nor do I need to use these features, because they are just syntactic sugar.

That is correct.

@Flibbles

They don’t actually provide solutions to previously unsolvable problems.

The problem that the new syntax attempts to solve is readability and brevity.

@Flibbles

I say it’s not the way TiddlyWiki is supposed to be used because TiddlyWiki is designed for modularity, not conditional logic. So functionality is introduced through modules which get plugged in. Or tiddlers with tags that get looped in implicitly through filters. Tiddlers are intended to be small, almost atomic, and to be looped in declaratively. That’s why there was a big move away from data-tiddlers (or at least that’s what I thought.).

Eloquently put. It is certainly true that conditional logic is needed much less frequently in TiddlyWiki than in some other environments, but it is still very common.

@Flibbles

Big chains of if-elses inside of a single tiddler is often a sign that a refactoring may be called for. I might not always be right, but in the odd cases where I’m wrong, I don’t know if it’s worth having an entire syntax dedicated to supporting a TiddlyWiki anti-pattern.

I can’t agree with the characterisation of if-then-else as an anti-pattern because I think it is common and (with the new syntax) perfectly readable.

@Flibbles

I can’t use these new syntaxes because a lot of users of my plugins froze their Tiddlywikis at older versions.

It is a similar situation with the core with respect to JavaScript versions: to be as universal as possible we constrain ourselves to an elderly variant of JavaScript. But it is not an argument that JavaScript should not continue to advance.