| > Your usage of emojis may be different from mine, but personally I'd estimate they appear in text about once per sentence (or even couple sentences) at the absolute most. That's quite a bit lower than the symbol density in most code. That's completely past my point. The point is: People are using special keyboards to input their emojis. (You can even buy those as hardware gadgets!) So there shouldn't be any issue with the requirement to use some special keyboard (layout) to input code if even causal people mange to use such special keyboard (layouts) for very mundane purposes. > > An "international" keyboard layout gives you already a shitload of "special" signs. > Unfortunately not always the _same_ shitload - for instance, the OS X layout for Norwegian has the seemingly-ordinary ( and ) on Option-Shift-8 and Option-Shift-9! I was talking especially about a so called "international layout", not some country specific one. https://dry.sailingissues.com/us-international-keyboard-layo... http://arjenvankol.com/dvorak.php Also for billions of people there is no direct correspondence between keys on the keyboard and the symbols they're trying to type. Just think about Asiatic languages. There is just no valid reason to limit the symbols used in programming to the ASCII set, as in every day use ASCII was already replaced by much richer symbol sets, which are perfectly fine to use for even less techy people. Only programming languages are caught in the "tradition" of drawing some "ASCII-art" instead of just using some proper Unicode symbols. That's laughable. Changing this would make in the end programming languages even simpler to read as, like I said, programming is symbolic by it's pure nature. Of course there is still a kind of balance needed: Using symbols for just everything wouldn't be helpful, as nobody wants to learn hundreds or even thousands of symbols just to read code (I'm not proposing to mimic an Asiatic language, as this wouldn't be accessible). But using a health mixture of symbols and words would be beneficial. Language level features would be better encoded as proper symbols (instead of the "written out symbols" we mostly use today, like e.g. "keywords"), but most user level code like APIs in libs should still remain word-based. APL got this almost right. Only that the code is too dense, imho, so it's hard to parse (for humans). But a modern language that would replace for example keywords with symbols would be a step forward again. |