[bloomingkales]

2. In general there aren’t a ton of punctuation characters that are very common, which is great for typing ergonomics. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a lot of symbols, but I feel compared to some languages such as Rust, they’re used a lot less.

I never really seen someone put that into words. I always feel a certain kind of weird when I look at a language with tons of punctuation (Typescript is good example).

[seanwilson]

I think typing ergonomics are overlooked as well. CSS has the most verbose syntax for variables I've had to use regularly e.g. `var(--primary-color)` which I find unpleasant to type when experimenting. And I actually like the lack of brackets and commas in OCaml for function e.g. you write `add_numbers 1 2` instead of `add_numbers(1, 2)`. Brackets and commas in particular require you to navigate left/right a lot to add them in the right place while iterating and give confusing errors when you get them wrong.

Would be curious if there's work into a programming language that was optimized for minimal typing while iterating.

[ttepasse]

Tangentially there is room for optimizing for non-american keyboards.

The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. For your example I had to type `, but then look ahead to the a of add_numbers and remember to put in an extra space, so that the ` and the "a" don't combine to an "à".

Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it.

Curly or square brackets, backslashes and other stuff also put you into uncomfortable AltGr or Cmd-Shift territory on some keyboards. American language designers are often blind for these simple ergonomics.

[JadeNB]

> The accent grave (backtick) you're using in a Markdown-inspired way is utterly annoying to type on keyboards where accents are implemented as dead keys, to be combined with vowels, common on european keyboard layouts. … Also I find it somewhat illogical: The usage of an accent as a character in itself in programming languages is one of my pet peeves. Just being an ASCII character is not reason good enough to keep using it.

I understand that keyboards behave as they behave, and saying that "well they shouldn't" isn't a real answer. But I also think that it's not true that the backtick character is an accent grave, even if it is treated like one, any more than any other pair of Unicode homoglyphs are the same.

[layer8]

> Brackets and commas in particular require you to navigate left/right a lot to add them in the right place while iterating and give confusing errors when you get them wrong.

In other languages, modern IDEs take care of that. For an invocation like `addNumbers(1, 2)`, you would perform code completion after typing “aN”, and the IDE would already fill in matching function arguments from the current scope. The selection (cursor) would be highlighting the first argument, so you can readily replace it. Pressing Tab would move to the next argument. Pressing Enter (or similar) would accept the call expression in the current state and move the cursor behind it. So you only type the actual arguments (if necessary) and otherwise just hit combinations of Tab and Enter, or Ctrl+Space for code completion. You generally don’t type the parentheses or commas yourself.

That being said, I’m in favor of languages with not too much punctuation. But there’s a balance, and too little punctuation can also hurt readability.

[yawaramin]

I also feel an ick when I have to type or read punctuation like this:

    (x) => { ... }

The => and { are directly pointing at each other and it kinda irritates me. Feels non-aesthetic.

[nsonha]

var(-- sounds like the person who writes the parser was either too lazy or sucks at his job so they asked the spec writer to give them a break.

[seanwilson]

I'd be interested in a link about this (can't find one from a quick look), but guessing it's to do with avoiding clashes with names in existing tools/code and backwards compatibility in browsers. In Sass, you would just write $primary-color, but if they copied that syntax exactly, it's likely going to get confusing for Sass tools if it's a Sass variable or a CSS variable.

[lolinder]

I feel the opposite—the typing ergonomics are better with a lower-punctuation language, but the reading ergonomics are substantially worse.

Punctuation is used in written human languages to provide assistance to our brain-parsers—like road signs that help navigate a sentence. Too much punctuation and it becomes a huge problem because it ceases to be meaningful, but have you ever tried reading a Roman inscription written with no spaces or sentence boundaries?

I think programming language punctuation serves the same role—it visually marks out how the parser is going to navigate the code, allowing the reader to use less mental effort repursing code that they initially misparsed. ML-style languages have a simpler syntax than the C family, which means there is some justification for having less assistive punctuation, but I've definitely struggled to navigate OCaml as a result of too little punctuation.

[akkad33]

The lambda syntax and default lambda parameters alone make typescript very hard to parse