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The Language Strangeness Budget
- natch 11y agoTL;DR for the article: When designing a programming language, one should be judicious about "strangeness", because users can tolerate only so much of it. We can think of this in terms of a "strangeness budget." Feedback for the writer: you should state up front that this article is about language design (as opposed to using languages). Then with that context you should immediately define what you mean by strangeness budget. In the first paragraph, if possible. Without these, it's a frustrating read because on the inevitable first skim, the reader comes across a lot of false clues that make it look like the topic is learning a language or building something with a language. It's super confusing. The whole meaning becomes clear on a careful close read, but that shouldn't be required for your point. Anyone who reads my TL;DR above is now polluted and won't see the problems I saw with the article. :-)