Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by okaleniuk 696 days ago
If syntax mattered that much, CMake would have opted for SOME VARIABLE = SOME VALUE. But... they went for set(SOME_VARIABLE "SOME VALUE") instead. I don't know why.

Syntax-wise C is fine. I personally have a soft spot for Rebol's "syntax free" approach, but the world prefers C. Five out of ten TIOBE's most popular languages have C-like syntax.

And you're right that the perception of C comes from the usage of C. Of course it does. But this creates the vicious cycle, the cycle things like Pnut are trying to break.

1 comments

> the world prefers C. Five out of ten TIOBE's most popular languages have C-like syntax.

I don't know which five you're classifying that way, but even for languages that started off C-like the trend is in the direction of less C-like. Even for C++ the big popular changes recently have been things like auto; similarly for Java, and C# always had a more lightweight syntax for expressing values. And certainly JavaScript has an object literal syntax good enough that people use it separately. Python is admittedly weirdly bad for writing values in; I wonder if that's why Scons has more or less failed.