I'm dyslexic. I haven't looked into it in detail, but someone once told me that dyslexia is some kind of problem processing things that are pronounceable. Whe

I'm dyslexic. I haven't looked into it in detail, but someone once told me that dyslexia is some kind of problem processing things that are pronounceable. When I was learning Japanese I was amazed how easy it was to read kanji (the Chinese) characters. Apparently processing things that are inherently symbolic (even if you can pronounce them) is done differently. It was like someone lifted a veil. Even now I prefer reading Japanese to English. I suspect if I learned Chinese I would enjoy it even more. The same goes for languages with symbols. For me, they are an order of magnitude more readable. Obviously people with dyslexia is a very narrow group to design a language around, but I suspect that there are others who also find it easier to think about symbols than words. That's why people design languages in this way (and as someone else pointed out, probably why math has such a large number of symbols). There are things that are easy to learn and things that are easy to use. Often there isn't as much overlap as you might expect between the two group. For something like programming languages, I'll take easy to use over easy to learn any day. Having said that, I am absolutely sure there are people who prefer having a big block of prose in their code. I see that kind of code frequently as well, so which one is easier to use almost certainly depends on the person.