I agree, but another thing that may be slithering around the subconcious of a skeptic, and one I think is not without merit, is the idea that beyond a certain point verbosity obscures rather than clarifies. Not to say that this is a completely empirical at decision time -- the verbosity of a particular language under consideration might be beneficial, but this may be what they are thinking. Peter J. Wasilko, Esq. wrote: 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 |