[bitmapper]

I personally don't like Rust (I like to have a garbage collector for what I do), but I don't think it's a hard to read language.

Readability is an incredibly subjective thing. For example, APL might look like an absolute mess to most people but to the people who know it, it's incredibly easy to read. All "readability" means in this context is that it's familiar to you.

In my opinion, the only truly hard to read languages are languages that require you to keep large amounts of context in memory while reading a specific part of the codebase, be it due to lack of support for abstractions for proper encapsulation, messy overloading, insane inheritance hierarchies, or something else.

EDIT: Readability also requires you have a codebase that's well written, and even that's subjective.

[lelanthran]

> For example, APL might look like an absolute mess to most people but to the people who know it, it's incredibly easy to read.

But if we use that as a bar ("you have to know it"), then all languages are equally readable.

Pretty much all the popular languages converge on similar syntax an/or grammar.

You can say that it is because that particular set of syntax is the first, or you can say that languages that didn't have similar syntax was abandoned by developers.

There is an equal evidence/lack of evidence for either claim.

[dgb23]

GP brought up a thing that’s certainly not equally represented in all languages. There are physical limitations for reading, and the amount of novel context you can juggle.

There is a balance between verbosity and conciseness that makes code more or less readable to different people.

If you have few experts who are maintaining a codebase over a longer time, then verbosity gets in the way. If you have a wider skill distribution and fast turnover, then you want verbosity.

Additionally I think there are more objective features. Like ambiguity, simplicity, formatting, naming, visual hierarchy...