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The impact of syntax is really undervalued. Syntax matters because many people are exposed to new languages through familiarity with other languages, as opposed

The impact of syntax is really undervalued. Syntax matters because many people are exposed to new languages through familiarity with other languages, as opposed to cramming a guide in isolation. And since programming languages are for humans, the cognitive load of understanding through reading and expressing through writing depends on one's ability to map the concepts to the code and vice versa. This is easier when similar languages look and -- through the power of abstraction, appear to -- work in similar ways. Go benefits from looking similar to the wider C family, while Erlang suffers from a syntactic heritage that never achieved as much prominence. The prevalence of languages in the syntactic style of C allows people unfamiliar with Go to be able to glean a lot of what's going on, and develop their understanding of Go-specific features gradually.

dnautics 8y ago
Anecdotally, it was really difficult for me to convince myself to learn SQL specifically due to the syntax and the fact that unlike the imperative languages I normally use it was declarative.
int_19h 8y ago
My simple smell test for language syntax readability is whether you can write a conditional statement with a multiline condition in it, without it looking ugly, and with the condition being clearly separate from the body. For example, in Lua or Ruby: if something() or other() then do_whatever() end It's very easy to read; your eye doesn't "stumble" anywhere it doesn't have a reason to. In C (and Java, C# etc), on the other hand: if (something() || other()) { do_whatever() } This makes for some confusing indentation, and now it's hard to distinguish what's condition and what's body! Sometimes people indent the entire condition to make it clearer: if ( something() || other()) { do_whatever() } but now you have holes in the middle which draw attention to that spot for no good reason. Or you can put ){ on a separate line: if ( something() || other() ) { do_whatever() } but so much punctuation hanging by itself is still an eyesore. And Python is hardly better: if ( something() or other() ): do_whatever() Go doesn't need the () in condition, so it's slightly more tolerable if you do that (but go fmt will object): if something() || other() { do_whatever() } But I'll take the Lua/Ruby syntax any day of the week. That's just one example. In retrospect, I think that C-style syntax was a bad idea in general, and adopting it as the "default syntax" across a large part of the industry was a monumental mistake. It favored compactness and speed of writing over readability and clarity. I really wish something like Modula or Ada would become the syntactic basis of modern languages today. I'd rather spend a few more keystrokes typing out things like "var" and "end", but end up with code that reads smoothly in a code review, or when debugging some ancient codebase.

dnautics 8y ago

Anecdotally, it was really difficult for me to convince myself to learn SQL specifically due to the syntax and the fact that unlike the imperative languages I normally use it was declarative.

int_19h 8y ago

My simple smell test for language syntax readability is whether you can write a conditional statement with a multiline condition in it, without it looking ugly, and with the condition being clearly separate from the body. For example, in Lua or Ruby: if something() or other() then do_whatever() end It's very easy to read; your eye doesn't "stumble" anywhere it doesn't have a reason to. In C (and Java, C# etc), on the other hand: if (something() || other()) { do_whatever() } This makes for some confusing indentation, and now it's hard to distinguish what's condition and what's body! Sometimes people indent the entire condition to make it clearer: if ( something() || other()) { do_whatever() } but now you have holes in the middle which draw attention to that spot for no good reason. Or you can put ){ on a separate line: if ( something() || other() ) { do_whatever() } but so much punctuation hanging by itself is still an eyesore. And Python is hardly better: if ( something() or other() ): do_whatever() Go doesn't need the () in condition, so it's slightly more tolerable if you do that (but go fmt will object): if something() || other() { do_whatever() } But I'll take the Lua/Ruby syntax any day of the week. That's just one example. In retrospect, I think that C-style syntax was a bad idea in general, and adopting it as the "default syntax" across a large part of the industry was a monumental mistake. It favored compactness and speed of writing over readability and clarity. I really wish something like Modula or Ada would become the syntactic basis of modern languages today. I'd rather spend a few more keystrokes typing out things like "var" and "end", but end up with code that reads smoothly in a code review, or when debugging some ancient codebase.