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> you might think you're making a point by repeating "it's all opinions", but that doesn't mean your single opinion is equal to everyone else. You're very wron

> you might think you're making a point by repeating "it's all opinions", but that doesn't mean your single opinion is equal to everyone else. You're very wrong. Readability is currently impossible to measure precisely. All the opinions are grounded in impossible to quantify and define personal skills, predispositions, and habits. "It" may be "more readable" to you. And your friends. That is still just your (and your friends') opinion, describing a feeling you have. It's not measurable. It's not provable. It's just what you think is happening, but that's it - just a thought. No facts. No measures. No definitions. As long as your opinion has these qualities, yes, it's equal to everyone else's. The problem with that is that it's narrow-minded. You should try to understand that, in different circumstances and for different people, the feeling of what's readable and not readable can be drastically different from your own. There are people who swear by ⍝P⌊ or K and say they're the most readable languages ever. Others will-tell-you-there's-nothing-wrong-with-kebab-case and that (parens (are (not (a) problem) either))))))). Some will tell you that any language will do, as long as you drown it in text (like Knuth's literate programming). Yet others will try to make prose be executable, like in Inform. Some will tell you $igil$ improve readability, some will say they don't. Some will be horrifiedSeeingCamelCase, others will_see_underscores_as_ugly. Some will fight for apps hungarian, some will lead a crusade against hungarian notation as a whole. The opinions are varied, exactly because there is no hard data to support any single position. Your opinion is yours to have, and you may live in a time and place where people you interact with share the same opinion, giving you an illusion of importance. One step outside of your bubble will show you otherwise - it's just an opinion, one of many, and not magically better just because it's yours.

monsieurbanana 6y ago
You can call me narrow-minded all you want, I'm not going to argue with someone who has this[0] as argument. Otherwise I'll be happy to discuss about whether multiple assignments is readable or not, but when the majority of people think it's not, maybe the onus is on you to at least advance some arguments? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26790701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26790701
- klibertp 6y ago
  > whether multiple assignments is readable or not, That's the whole point: multiple assignments (and everything else) are NEITHER readable NOR unreadable, objectively. There is no way to argue either way. Appeal to majority is a fallacy, so it's a non starter. Other than that, there's no data, no hard facts, no measures, nothing to talk about! Again: multiple assignements (and everything else) may feel easier to read to you. It's just a feeling. There are bound to be people who feel differently. Both positions are equally subjective. It's further complicated by the fact that readability is NOT a simple function of lexical structure. The exact same line of code can be unreadable to you at one point, then once you learn the intent or rule behind it, it magically becomes redable. It just "clicks" and suddenly you have no problems with reading it. There are some properties which seem to correlate with readability, like predictability. There are some hard constraints due to how the eye is built. Even if you narrow those as much as possible, the space of possible syntaxes and styles which fit in these is absulutely HUGE. I mentioned APL. This is an example taken from the front page of APL wiki: ','(≠⊆⊢)'comma,delimited,text' ┌─────┬─────────┬────┐ │comma│delimited│text│ └─────┴─────────┴────┘ And this is the commentary below it: "many functions can be expressed in fewer characters than even the shortest fitting name. For example ≠⊆⊢ is but three characters, while you would need five for the name Split" They argue that "≠⊆⊢" is more readable than "Split". And, to them, it IS - once they learned the language. This suggests that readability is much more dependent on your knowledge, skills, and habits, than on the objective shape of piece of code. I went out of my way to learn the widest possible variety of programming languages. The spectrum of things considered readable or not is so wide that it's really hard to find ANY points common to all of the languages. If there even are any! So, again, step outside of your bubble and your mind will be blown.

monsieurbanana 6y ago

You can call me narrow-minded all you want, I'm not going to argue with someone who has this[0] as argument. Otherwise I'll be happy to discuss about whether multiple assignments is readable or not, but when the majority of people think it's not, maybe the onus is on you to at least advance some arguments? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26790701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26790701

klibertp 6y ago
> whether multiple assignments is readable or not, That's the whole point: multiple assignments (and everything else) are NEITHER readable NOR unreadable, objectively. There is no way to argue either way. Appeal to majority is a fallacy, so it's a non starter. Other than that, there's no data, no hard facts, no measures, nothing to talk about! Again: multiple assignements (and everything else) may feel easier to read to you. It's just a feeling. There are bound to be people who feel differently. Both positions are equally subjective. It's further complicated by the fact that readability is NOT a simple function of lexical structure. The exact same line of code can be unreadable to you at one point, then once you learn the intent or rule behind it, it magically becomes redable. It just "clicks" and suddenly you have no problems with reading it. There are some properties which seem to correlate with readability, like predictability. There are some hard constraints due to how the eye is built. Even if you narrow those as much as possible, the space of possible syntaxes and styles which fit in these is absulutely HUGE. I mentioned APL. This is an example taken from the front page of APL wiki: ','(≠⊆⊢)'comma,delimited,text' ┌─────┬─────────┬────┐ │comma│delimited│text│ └─────┴─────────┴────┘ And this is the commentary below it: "many functions can be expressed in fewer characters than even the shortest fitting name. For example ≠⊆⊢ is but three characters, while you would need five for the name Split" They argue that "≠⊆⊢" is more readable than "Split". And, to them, it IS - once they learned the language. This suggests that readability is much more dependent on your knowledge, skills, and habits, than on the objective shape of piece of code. I went out of my way to learn the widest possible variety of programming languages. The spectrum of things considered readable or not is so wide that it's really hard to find ANY points common to all of the languages. If there even are any! So, again, step outside of your bubble and your mind will be blown.