[mixmastamyk]

> Being explicit adds syntax.

Not what they are talking about. Rather better to use words instead of symbols, like python over perl.

Instead of “turbofish” and <‘a>, there could be more key words like mut or dyn. Semicolons and ‘c’har are straight out of the seventies as well. :: not useful and ugly, etc.

Dunders avoid namespace collisions and are not a big problem in practice, all one char, and easy to read. I might remove the trailing part if I had the power.

[Aurornis]

This is just personal preferences and familiarity

Python using indenting to convey specific programming meaning feels janky and outdated to people not familiar with Python, but Python familiar programmers don't think twice about it.

[morshu9001]

I've been relying on Python for a decade+ and still think twice about the indentation. Straight up bad design, and you can't even attribute it to the original use case of dirty scripting cause it's particularly bad in a REPL.

[mixmastamyk]

No, it’s not only familiarity. I learned C/C++ in the early 90s, before Python.

It’s well studied that words are easier to read than nested symbols.

[yoyohello13]

Maybe it's my math background but I honestly prefer symbols to keywords. It's more up front cost in learning, but it's much more efficient in the long run.

[mixmastamyk]

When you are doing multiple operations to multiple variables, and need to see it all at once, math-like syntax still has benefits.

But this is not the common case for most programming, which is about detailing business rules. Explicit and verbose (though not excessively) has been shown to be the most readable/maintainable. For example, one character variable names, common in math, are heavily discouraged in professional development.

There’s another level to this as well. To me, calculus notation looks quite elegant, while Perl and (parts of) Rust look like trash. Since they are somewhat similar, the remaining angle is good taste.