25 ms·

In the English speaking world, I have a hard time justifying untypeable identifiers. Maybe, and this is a fat maybe, Greek symbols could make the odd write-once

In the English speaking world, I have a hard time justifying untypeable identifiers. Maybe, and this is a fat maybe, Greek symbols could make the odd write-once math or scientific code easier to read. It would be bonkers to use any non-ascii codepoints in a public API.

beforeolives 5y ago
> Maybe, and this is a fat maybe, Greek symbols could make the odd write-once math or scientific code easier to read. The Julia community has been trying really hard to convince people that this is a good idea and I'm still not on board with it.
- high_density 5y ago
  maybe we can have some keyboard plugin/"mode" that merges letters to form symbols in special way? Korean windows have a "special-emoji" keyboard that can be invoked by: 1. type a charactor 2. press 'hanja' key 3. (wild special character selection menu appears) example: § (from 'ㅁ') / ㈜ (from 'ㅁ') / ㎖ (from 'ㄹ')
  - kibwen 5y ago
    Most Linux environments already have this, it's called "compose key". You may need to enable it in your desktop environment's settings, but then after pressing the key you can press !? to type ‽, 12 to type ½, <= to type ≤, n~ to type ñ, <3 to type ♥, etc. Here's GTK's list: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GtkComposeTable https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GtkComposeTable
  - mynameisash 5y ago
    It would be nice if this were built into Windows, but in lieu of that, I have been using WinCompose[0] for several years for typing diacritics (as part of my learning French). For example: * ALT e' = é * ALT u " = ü * ALT n ~ = ñ It's not limited to diacritics; you can type ligatures (ALT ae = æ), extended characters (ALT [/] = ), I assume the majority of UTF (ALT #G = 𝄞) and so on. And yes, even emoji (ALT ALT alembic = ) edit: apparently, HN won't show the checkbox (U+2611) or alembic[1]. [0] http://wincompose.info/ http://wincompose.info/ [1] https://emojipedia.org/alembic/ https://emojipedia.org/alembic/
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      > It would be nice if this were built into Windows, but in lieu of that Something that's basically equivalent is builtin. Just switch your keyboard from EN-US to EN-INTL, and now several accent characters become dead keys, so ' e = é, etc.
  - borodi 5y ago
    Julia does this in a pretty simple way, you type \lamdba then press tab and it becomes λ, emojis and many other things work like this, so typing them is very wasy.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    For Windows, the ENG-INTL keyboard layout is pretty good for simple accented characters, covering latin-based European languages [1]. Windows+. also allows you to just type to search for emojis, so e.g. typing WINDOWS+. sad ENTER gives you a sad emoji. Sadly this doesn't work for symbols, even though the Windows+. menu has a good coverage of symbols. I guess you can always switch your keyboard to Korean input. 1: https://community.windows.com/en-us/stories/keyboard-shortcuts-for-typing-accent-marks-over-letters-in-windows-10 https://community.windows.com/en-us/stories/keyboard-shortcu...
- BadInformatics 5y ago
  It helps here to have good shortcuts (i.e. \tex like commands) for all the symbols. Otherwise writing them is a PITA and nobody will do it (e.g. Go supports full unicode identifiers, when was the last time you saw one in the wild?)
  - buzer 5y ago
    > Go supports full unicode identifiers, when was the last time you saw one in the wild? Back when someone used them to add pseudo-generics https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_enjarify_in_go_and_rust/dcsgk7n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...
- remexre 5y ago
  Scientific computing is actually a use-case I see this working well in; IMO, it's perfectly fine to have terse code that exactly matches up to equations in a longer paper that justifies correctness, etc. (as long as the paper is easy to find from the code!)
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  This is the one thing I used to love about Maple back in college. You can compute directly with mathematical symbols, draw matrices and rational numbers the same way you would on paper, and the language runtime understands it. Too bad it's a $5000 license or whatever.
kadoban 5y ago
It's really not hard at all to make them typeable, it just requires some minor setup (use an IME). Still doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea, but it's not a total blocker.
freeopinion 5y ago
Your statement here has so many qualifiers that it's hard to treat it as a general rule. "English speaking world" "untypeable" "public API" Even then you exempt Greek symbols. I suppose you might be willing to accept ¢ or €. Of course, "untypeable" is very ambiguous. Still, not all code is "public API" and not all code is intended for the English speaking world. So I think it's great to support non-ASCII symbols. よろしく
- jagger27 5y ago
  I was not trying to argue against its general support, only that for this English-speaking audience (HN) there are very limited use cases.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Even if english speaking, it is still ambiguous. For example in my keyboard the micro sign (µ; not to be confused with the Greek small letter mu) is easy to type (AltGr + M). I bet this is the same for the majority of HN users. The US keyboard doesn’t use third level shift (usually AltGr) so most people that use US keyboard exclusively are unaware of this. Whenever I see people using the Latin small letter U (u) instead of the micro sign, all I think about is how restrictive the US keyboard actually is, and how much of a shame it is that the culture which predominantly uses this restrictive keyboard design came to be the dominant when designing computer interfaces.
    - jdrek1 5y ago
      > For example in my keyboard the micro sign (µ; not to be confused with the Greek small letter mu) The greek letter mu IS the micro sign, where do you think it comes from?
      - runarberg 5y ago
        Look the same, but different code points. MICRO SIGN (U+00B5)[1] vs. GREEK SMALL LETTER MU (U+03BC)[2] 1: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00b5/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00b5/index.htm 2: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03bc/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03bc/index.htm
Pet_Ant 5y ago
I like to use the poop emoji in the names of methods that are dangerous hacks that we want to (eventually) get rid of. Being harder to type is part of the point.
- airhead969 5y ago
  Can't you just use poop emoji in comments and search for them like TODOs?
  - Peckingjay 5y ago
    I assume making the name of the function they want to eventually get rid of more annoying to type is part of the reason to do this rather than just tracking ones needing replacement.
  - Pet_Ant 5y ago
    But then others won't feel dirty when they use the method. The goal is to make people feel bad when they add more usages of it and make it harder to remove. This is the case when it's easier and faster than the proper way. When there is crunch time it's hard to push your lead to reject the PR so it's soft pressure and it's apparent at the call site whereas a TODO in the method definition is not.
    - kibwen 5y ago
      There is a famous story of a codebase that used `sleep` calls for this purpose. Start by sleeping 1 ms every time that the undesired function is called. Next release, up it to 10 ms, then 100 ms, and so on.
    - dllthomas 5y ago
      Reminds me of Haskell's tendency to prepend "unsafe" (or, in one case where that was insufficiently dire, "accursedUnutterable"), although the use case is a little different.
    - airhead969 5y ago
      But that's method shaming! /s I guess you have a point. It's clearly a "let's meet in the back alley" API.
vvillena 5y ago
There's lots of non-english codebases out there, supporting symbols for their languages is a big deal. In a way, it's in part a job for the dev tools. Autocomplete engines should be able to complete these symbols from an ascii-only hint. 'a' should offer "α" as one of the completion options, and 'bla' should offer "BLÅHAJ".
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
They're hard to type if you're a Windows user. Other OSes have better input systems.
dt12345 5y ago
I tried doing this once, but it's not worth the pain of having to switch keyboards or copy-paste symbols
- dllthomas 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

beforeolives 5y ago

> Maybe, and this is a fat maybe, Greek symbols could make the odd write-once math or scientific code easier to read. The Julia community has been trying really hard to convince people that this is a good idea and I'm still not on board with it.

high_density 5y ago
maybe we can have some keyboard plugin/"mode" that merges letters to form symbols in special way? Korean windows have a "special-emoji" keyboard that can be invoked by: 1. type a charactor 2. press 'hanja' key 3. (wild special character selection menu appears) example: § (from 'ㅁ') / ㈜ (from 'ㅁ') / ㎖ (from 'ㄹ')
- kibwen 5y ago
  Most Linux environments already have this, it's called "compose key". You may need to enable it in your desktop environment's settings, but then after pressing the key you can press !? to type ‽, 12 to type ½, <= to type ≤, n~ to type ñ, <3 to type ♥, etc. Here's GTK's list: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GtkComposeTable https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GtkComposeTable
- mynameisash 5y ago
  It would be nice if this were built into Windows, but in lieu of that, I have been using WinCompose[0] for several years for typing diacritics (as part of my learning French). For example: * ALT e' = é * ALT u " = ü * ALT n ~ = ñ It's not limited to diacritics; you can type ligatures (ALT ae = æ), extended characters (ALT [/] = ), I assume the majority of UTF (ALT #G = 𝄞) and so on. And yes, even emoji (ALT ALT alembic = ) edit: apparently, HN won't show the checkbox (U+2611) or alembic[1]. [0] http://wincompose.info/ http://wincompose.info/ [1] https://emojipedia.org/alembic/ https://emojipedia.org/alembic/
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    > It would be nice if this were built into Windows, but in lieu of that Something that's basically equivalent is builtin. Just switch your keyboard from EN-US to EN-INTL, and now several accent characters become dead keys, so ' e = é, etc.
- borodi 5y ago
  Julia does this in a pretty simple way, you type \lamdba then press tab and it becomes λ, emojis and many other things work like this, so typing them is very wasy.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  For Windows, the ENG-INTL keyboard layout is pretty good for simple accented characters, covering latin-based European languages [1]. Windows+. also allows you to just type to search for emojis, so e.g. typing WINDOWS+. sad ENTER gives you a sad emoji. Sadly this doesn't work for symbols, even though the Windows+. menu has a good coverage of symbols. I guess you can always switch your keyboard to Korean input. 1: https://community.windows.com/en-us/stories/keyboard-shortcuts-for-typing-accent-marks-over-letters-in-windows-10 https://community.windows.com/en-us/stories/keyboard-shortcu...
BadInformatics 5y ago
It helps here to have good shortcuts (i.e. \tex like commands) for all the symbols. Otherwise writing them is a PITA and nobody will do it (e.g. Go supports full unicode identifiers, when was the last time you saw one in the wild?)
- buzer 5y ago
  > Go supports full unicode identifiers, when was the last time you saw one in the wild? Back when someone used them to add pseudo-generics https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_enjarify_in_go_and_rust/dcsgk7n/ https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...
remexre 5y ago
Scientific computing is actually a use-case I see this working well in; IMO, it's perfectly fine to have terse code that exactly matches up to equations in a longer paper that justifies correctness, etc. (as long as the paper is easy to find from the code!)
nonameiguess 5y ago
This is the one thing I used to love about Maple back in college. You can compute directly with mathematical symbols, draw matrices and rational numbers the same way you would on paper, and the language runtime understands it. Too bad it's a $5000 license or whatever.

kadoban 5y ago

It's really not hard at all to make them typeable, it just requires some minor setup (use an IME). Still doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea, but it's not a total blocker.

freeopinion 5y ago

Your statement here has so many qualifiers that it's hard to treat it as a general rule. "English speaking world" "untypeable" "public API" Even then you exempt Greek symbols. I suppose you might be willing to accept ¢ or €. Of course, "untypeable" is very ambiguous. Still, not all code is "public API" and not all code is intended for the English speaking world. So I think it's great to support non-ASCII symbols. よろしく

jagger27 5y ago
I was not trying to argue against its general support, only that for this English-speaking audience (HN) there are very limited use cases.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Even if english speaking, it is still ambiguous. For example in my keyboard the micro sign (µ; not to be confused with the Greek small letter mu) is easy to type (AltGr + M). I bet this is the same for the majority of HN users. The US keyboard doesn’t use third level shift (usually AltGr) so most people that use US keyboard exclusively are unaware of this. Whenever I see people using the Latin small letter U (u) instead of the micro sign, all I think about is how restrictive the US keyboard actually is, and how much of a shame it is that the culture which predominantly uses this restrictive keyboard design came to be the dominant when designing computer interfaces.
  - jdrek1 5y ago
    > For example in my keyboard the micro sign (µ; not to be confused with the Greek small letter mu) The greek letter mu IS the micro sign, where do you think it comes from?
    - runarberg 5y ago
      Look the same, but different code points. MICRO SIGN (U+00B5)[1] vs. GREEK SMALL LETTER MU (U+03BC)[2] 1: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00b5/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00b5/index.htm 2: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03bc/index.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/03bc/index.htm

Pet_Ant 5y ago

I like to use the poop emoji in the names of methods that are dangerous hacks that we want to (eventually) get rid of. Being harder to type is part of the point.

airhead969 5y ago
Can't you just use poop emoji in comments and search for them like TODOs?
- Peckingjay 5y ago
  I assume making the name of the function they want to eventually get rid of more annoying to type is part of the reason to do this rather than just tracking ones needing replacement.
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
  But then others won't feel dirty when they use the method. The goal is to make people feel bad when they add more usages of it and make it harder to remove. This is the case when it's easier and faster than the proper way. When there is crunch time it's hard to push your lead to reject the PR so it's soft pressure and it's apparent at the call site whereas a TODO in the method definition is not.
  - kibwen 5y ago
    There is a famous story of a codebase that used `sleep` calls for this purpose. Start by sleeping 1 ms every time that the undesired function is called. Next release, up it to 10 ms, then 100 ms, and so on.
  - dllthomas 5y ago
    Reminds me of Haskell's tendency to prepend "unsafe" (or, in one case where that was insufficiently dire, "accursedUnutterable"), although the use case is a little different.
  - airhead969 5y ago
    But that's method shaming! /s I guess you have a point. It's clearly a "let's meet in the back alley" API.

vvillena 5y ago

There's lots of non-english codebases out there, supporting symbols for their languages is a big deal. In a way, it's in part a job for the dev tools. Autocomplete engines should be able to complete these symbols from an ascii-only hint. 'a' should offer "α" as one of the completion options, and 'bla' should offer "BLÅHAJ".

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

They're hard to type if you're a Windows user. Other OSes have better input systems.

dt12345 5y ago

I tried doing this once, but it's not worth the pain of having to switch keyboards or copy-paste symbols

dllthomas 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key