Not really. Python is famous for its readability, and this interest in reducing "noise" is one of the reasons why. It's definitely something that a language could benefit from at least riffing off, if not stealing outright.
The Python philosophy is that everything is expressed clearly and concisely. Parens around conditionals are just restating information that is already apparent, as are semicolons between lines. Fluent readers actually learn to ignore these syntactic features unless they're debugging (since these useless tokens are a breeding ground for bugs).
Ask yourself: How often do you mentally match the opening and closing parens on a conditional? How often do you rely on semicolons to tell when you're looking at a new statement as opposed to just looking at the lines of code?
Yeah, listen. I'm a python programmer as a matter of profession and paycheck.
It's a matter of taste.
Do I prefer significant whitespace ala python/haskell?
Yes.
Does it matter? No.
Does it matter when you're discussing a programming language you've just now encountered for the first time and is rather new and has many novel things to contribute to the world?
Fuck no.
Like I said, it was a vacuous thing to say. There are far more important questions to ask like,
"Are the generics a space-time trade-off similar to C++ templates?"
"Can I use the type system to encapsulate and restrict behavior in powerful ways, allow me to create performant but safe code?"
"Can I make a beowulf cluster out of this?"
Any of those questions have more substance than, "hurr whitespace is bettar why didn't you do tghaaaasdfsdgsg"
Your entire response focuses on significant whitespace, which I didn't mention at all in mine.
And no, the time-space tradeoff of the generics is not necessarily a better question than how readable the language is. That is a matter of taste. I will spend more time reading the code than I will worrying about the performance characteristics of generics or creating a Beowulf cluster, so caring about the common case is not exactly vacuous, even if it isn't the #1 most important thing.
>Your entire response focuses on significant whitespace, which I didn't mention at all in mine.
Doesn't matter.
>Beowulf cluster
It was a fatuous comment designed to compare with the original fatuous comment.
>the time-space tradeoff of the generics is not necessarily a better question than how readable the language is. That is a matter of taste
No it's not. Taste is preference, whether or not a language is impossible to deploy with generics in an embedded environment has absolutely nothing to do with whining about syntax.
importance:
Semantics > syntax
I don't think I've seen sophistry and an obsession with the trivial on hackerne.ws like this in quite some time.
You're complaining about the color of the bikeshed when real discussion and work is to be done concerning the semantics and structure of the language?
I think you're unnecessarily trivializing things that you personally care less about. Who cares about embedded environments? People who work in them. Is that group dwarfed by the group of "programmers who have to read and debug code"? Yes it is. So it seems really petty to personally insult me for caring (not much, but a little) about something that makes code less bug-prone and easier to read for everybody while you hold up something that affects a vanishingly small number of people as what we should be talking about.
Your complaints seem to reflect an idea that only features and implementations matter, while user interface is fairly trivial. If you believe that, I think you might be interested in this: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy/
Web design is the art of creating user interfaces for websites – the website visitors are the users. Language design is the art of creating user interfaces for programs – programmers are the users. The fields are related by the common theme of designing things for users. And I don’t see how you can call eye candy trivial without defending that assertion right after reading an article that argues it is not trivial.
Please don’t resort to blatant ad-hominem misquoting. My remarks were not as stupid as “hurr” and “tghaaaasdfsdgsg”, they were statements that I put much thought behind. And rather than saying my thoughts were vacuous (mindless, meaningless), since you admit you prefer significant whitespace too, the worst you could call them is irrelevant.
As for why I decided to bring the syntax up when semantics are more important, it seems to me that if a language designer hasn’t thought about the syntax of a language and has just copied verbatim the syntax of Java/C, then they show a lack of attention to detail, and there is a greater probability that they will continue to show this lack of attention to detail when designing the rest of the language. Yes, I could read the whole semantics section of the language spec and evaluate it directly, but that takes more time than some people have when faced with yet another unproven language to consider learning or watching. I’m sure more people than me use syntax as a warning sign, so the syntax of a language is important if the designer doesn’t want to scare these people off.
The Python philosophy is that everything is expressed clearly and concisely. Parens around conditionals are just restating information that is already apparent, as are semicolons between lines. Fluent readers actually learn to ignore these syntactic features unless they're debugging (since these useless tokens are a breeding ground for bugs).
Ask yourself: How often do you mentally match the opening and closing parens on a conditional? How often do you rely on semicolons to tell when you're looking at a new statement as opposed to just looking at the lines of code?