Re: syntax trouble (was Re: bindings and assignments)

["Peter J. Wasilko, Esq." <address@hidden>]

>        I think it's simply if you're going to work in a language the 
> thought of all those millions of (supposedly) extra keystrokes you'll 
> have to type over time (COBOL, anyone?).  Of course the prospective 
> programmer's thought doesn't take into account the idea that your 
> programs might actually be shorter overall... :-)


People also seem to forget that modern editing environments can do
things like suggesting auto-completions of long strings and provide
structure editors as an alternative to programmer entered parentheses
like the Tile-based metaphor used by Alice2 to control 3-d animations.
Not to mention the comprehensibility benefits of a verbose but powerful
abstraction that can sufficiently shorten overall code to pay for its
extra local keystrokes.

Basing judgments of language viability on the ease of code entry with an
unadorned text editor is sadly shortsighted. Redundance can be a good
things, just think of how many Perl and C typos's would be eliminated if
their syntax were more verbose and minor misskeyings were less likely to
yield syntactically valid code.

-- Peter



_________________________________________________________________

Peter J. Wasilko, Esq.
     J.D., LL.M.               

Executive Director, The Institute for End User Computing, Inc.

Visit us on the web at: http://www.ieuc.org

_________________________________________________________________

Its time to abandon brittle architectures with poorly factored
interfaces, gratuitous complexity, and kludged designs dominated
by sacrifices on the altar of backwards compatibility.

Such artifacts are vulnerable to cyber-attack, weigh down the
economy costing trillions of dollars in lost productivity, and
suffer from an impoverished conceptual model that lacks the
integration and elegance needed to empower end users to
get the most from advanced applications in the future.

_________________________________________________________________
The Institute for End User Computing --- Pursuing Secure, Simple, 
   Supple, & Sophisticated Systems to Unlock Our Human Potential
_________________________________________________________________

* The Institute is incorporated under New York State's
   Not-For-Profit Corporation Law