4 ms·

That's a lot of effort for little benefits I can already see a lot of edge cases Most notably font support I like ligatures and ide/editor support for them,

by asjw 6y ago

That's a lot of effort for little benefits I can already see a lot of edge cases Most notably font support I like ligatures and ide/editor support for them, but I'm not sure I like this

BurningFrog 6y ago
The benefit is purely readability. You read code 1000x more often than you write it, so a little extra effort for even a small readability benefit is worth it. Most fonts have quite full Unicode support since many years. I'm often disappointed in how reluctant programmers are to use modern technology. The public thinks we're on the cutting edge of advanced technology. If they only knew :)
- tcbasche 6y ago
  This is just unnecessarily salty. Fonts may have full unicode support, but do keyboards? I don't want to have to press some weird key combination to type a symbol I might type hundreds of times each day. Honestly, it's just common sense.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Even Spanish keyboards only have a dedicated Ñ key, so you have to use multi-key sequences to input ÁÉÍÓÚÜ etc. And even after typing in Spanish for five years, it's still objectively more annoying to write está (6 keypresses) vs esta (4 keypresses). And I'm always having to go back and correct the key sequence because I've written ´a instead of á. Also, just today I saw someone use "⇸" (crossed out arrow) on HN and it was so tiny with HN's font that I had to zoom in to see what it was which only inhibited their message. You have to consider this sort of overhead when making decisions about the glyphs you are going to impose upon everyone when designing a language. I've seen pages and pages of bike-shedding over whether to use kebab-case over snake_case for a DSL because it's one less keypress to type a hyphen vs underscore. I can appreciate your preference for those characters. It's nice how they can encode meaning in a single glyph where you would otherwise need multiple glyphs (like "!="). One solution that you can find people doing today are IDE plugins that simply rerender something like "->" as "→". Seems like the best of all worlds. You get to work with higher level characters while the plaintext format remains in the most accessible common denominator.
- asjw 6y ago
  > The benefit is purely readability. This year mark my 30th year as a professional developer, but my first "program" was copied fro a magazine 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 It generated random maze like structures in screen using two PETSCII symbols I think everybody know this one liner here So it's not symbols I don't like, it's the lack of ergonomics My hands started hurting when I had to type a lot to write simple symbols like } that's why I switched to US layout and things have gone a lot better for my nuckles What really surprises and disappoints me is how many people appoint themselves as engineers or computer scientists, but take for granted that their ideas are good and the rebuttals are "resistance to change" without even reading the most basic studies on the topic or testing their theories on the field. Implement your idea, measure the results and then we'll discuss of why they didn't take off. Because they won't, believe me. There is a reason why I use font with the zero striked, otherwise capital O would look too similar. What do you think of ‹‹ vs « ? Do they really look different enough to be useful? Cutting edge doesn't mean "stupid"

by asjw 6y ago

That's a lot of effort for little benefits I can already see a lot of edge cases Most notably font support I like ligatures and ide/editor support for them, but I'm not sure I like this

BurningFrog 6y ago

The benefit is purely readability. You read code 1000x more often than you write it, so a little extra effort for even a small readability benefit is worth it. Most fonts have quite full Unicode support since many years. I'm often disappointed in how reluctant programmers are to use modern technology. The public thinks we're on the cutting edge of advanced technology. If they only knew :)

tcbasche 6y ago
This is just unnecessarily salty. Fonts may have full unicode support, but do keyboards? I don't want to have to press some weird key combination to type a symbol I might type hundreds of times each day. Honestly, it's just common sense.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Even Spanish keyboards only have a dedicated Ñ key, so you have to use multi-key sequences to input ÁÉÍÓÚÜ etc. And even after typing in Spanish for five years, it's still objectively more annoying to write está (6 keypresses) vs esta (4 keypresses). And I'm always having to go back and correct the key sequence because I've written ´a instead of á. Also, just today I saw someone use "⇸" (crossed out arrow) on HN and it was so tiny with HN's font that I had to zoom in to see what it was which only inhibited their message. You have to consider this sort of overhead when making decisions about the glyphs you are going to impose upon everyone when designing a language. I've seen pages and pages of bike-shedding over whether to use kebab-case over snake_case for a DSL because it's one less keypress to type a hyphen vs underscore. I can appreciate your preference for those characters. It's nice how they can encode meaning in a single glyph where you would otherwise need multiple glyphs (like "!="). One solution that you can find people doing today are IDE plugins that simply rerender something like "->" as "→". Seems like the best of all worlds. You get to work with higher level characters while the plaintext format remains in the most accessible common denominator.
asjw 6y ago
> The benefit is purely readability. This year mark my 30th year as a professional developer, but my first "program" was copied fro a magazine 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 It generated random maze like structures in screen using two PETSCII symbols I think everybody know this one liner here So it's not symbols I don't like, it's the lack of ergonomics My hands started hurting when I had to type a lot to write simple symbols like } that's why I switched to US layout and things have gone a lot better for my nuckles What really surprises and disappoints me is how many people appoint themselves as engineers or computer scientists, but take for granted that their ideas are good and the rebuttals are "resistance to change" without even reading the most basic studies on the topic or testing their theories on the field. Implement your idea, measure the results and then we'll discuss of why they didn't take off. Because they won't, believe me. There is a reason why I use font with the zero striked, otherwise capital O would look too similar. What do you think of ‹‹ vs « ? Do they really look different enough to be useful? Cutting edge doesn't mean "stupid"