[wwalexander]

I also find it frustrating, but I’ve come to appreciate that it’s a way to at least partially sidestep the hard problem of naming things. There are still idioms and choices to make, but using abstract symbols makes it easier to play with the abstract concepts being presented.

My most-used programming language is Go, but I’ve been writing mainly Swift for the past year or so. While there’s a lot I like about Swift, its verbosity leads me to waste an inordinate amount of time pondering what the correct verbiage ought to be, and I often miss Go’s more terse, often single-character naming convention.

[lmm]

> My most-used programming language is Go, but I’ve been writing mainly Swift for the past year or so. While there’s a lot I like about Swift, its verbosity leads me to waste an inordinate amount of time pondering what the correct verbiage ought to be, and I often miss Go’s more terse, often single-character naming convention.

Huh. I was expecting that comparison to go the other way given Go's notorious verbosity in terms of error handling, generics etc.. Maybe people compensate for verbosity in one area by being more concise in others (though that doesn't explain e.g. APL).

[wwalexander]

I would say that Go is extremely explicit, but I wouldn’t say it’s verbose.

Or, I suppose you could say that Go is semantically verbose (explicit error handling, no/low use of generics, no operator overloading), but syntactically concise (short variable names). Swift is the opposite, being semantically concise (extremely heavy use of generics, default arguments) but syntactically verbose (labeled arguments, English-like clauses, result builders).