3 ms·

It is interesting that designers universally agree that fonts matter, but programmers can't agree on whether syntax matters.

• sametmax 11y ago
  Some dev does. E.G: it's very important for the Python community and it one of the selling point of the language. I tend to think that syntax IS very important for the very same reasons Guido does: We are basically typers. Making a language with many special charaters hard to type on your keyboard is going to make you work more, no matter how you slice it. Yet we read code 100x more times than we read it. Hence reading must be efficient. But there is a soft spot between a code being too long or too concise, either abuse making it harder to scan. And we scan a lot. Take the colon in Python blocks for example, it is syntaxically useless: if stuff: # <- the compiler could do without this foo() It's main appeal is to improve your hability to scan the code: - your brain can quickly catch all starting block in all nested these indents. - it's way easier to type than "{" - you use it the same way you would do it while writting english (see this very post). It's familiar, and you are already trained by grade school to scan it. So yes, since you will spend 8h a day reading source code, syntax is of the most importance, so you can express enough, and yet read it without too much though.