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BEGIN and END? Curly braces being an issue comparable those faced by a language like APL? We clearly have very different opinions on what drives or impedes lang

• JdeBP 9y ago
  Have a look around. You'll find several decades' worth of people complaining about the "curly brace languages" in the very same way that you just talked about APL and "wacky keyboard requirements". You'll find far more programmers adapting their keyboards to their languages, for those sorts of languages, from people employing "programmer" keyboard layouts to people buying whole add-on or replacement keyboards (sometimes from other continents), than you'll find people complaining about keyboards and APL. The idea that APL wasn't adopted because programmers were stuck with keyboards that did not match it is 1980s received wisdom, recirculated in part because people look back at history such as this very item at hand. We have, however, over three decades' worth of experience of a world where programmers very much do change keyboards to suit their needs. The evidence of subsequent and even contemporary history shows that the received wisdom is wrong. A case in point that is even contemporary to Dijkstra's letter: In the 1980s, the ZX80 and ZX81 came out, famously with keyboards that could directly enter tokenized BASIC, token by token. Yet the fact that one could not do this with (say) a PC/XT keyboard (or even a QL keyboard, for that matter) was not seen as a problem with BASIC, or a reason to abandon it.