JordanEvery now and then people share languages with very minimal or very uniform syntax (think Lisp, or Haskell, or Forth) and go "look, all the noise is gone". And to each their own, and familiarity goes a long way, but I think I've pinned down my feelings about it, which is "that wasn't noise, that was signal; I was using as scaffolding when reading the code and now I have to wade through every token linearly".
"Jordan, you don't read code linearly?" You don't understand, I don't even read prose linearly. I'd have to sit down and try some real self-observation to figure out how my prose reading works, but it is very much not word-by-word. Which I know because various situations (like "bionic reading" formatting) can force me to go word-by-word, and it is a different (and generally slower) experience.
Fedor Indutny@jrose I actually read across lines when reading prose (and I suspect software too). I haven't understood that I was doing it for a long time, but eventually realized it was happening.
Gina Peter Banyard@jrose I'm fairly certain the majority of people don't actually read linearly word-by-word.
Why do I think this?
When I took drama lessons the amount of times our teacher told us "no that's not what's written" and multiple of us needed to go back and actually parse the words in a sentence to realise that we either added, omitted or straight up swapped a word compared to what's written is staggering.
Our brains try to optimise everything, including reading.
Lona Theartlav@jrose Mood. One reason why i prefer pascal like syntax is that the extra verbosity of it makes the code look more visually structured to me.
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑@theartlav @jrose
Agreed.
Even C-like languages, used with braces at matched indentation, can do that, but K&R style can't, at least for me.
Agreed.
Even C-like languages, used with braces at matched indentation, can do that, but K&R style can't, at least for me.
Jan Schiefer@jrose I am surprised that anybody can read non-trivial code linearly! Especially in OO-languages, where I would be helpless without cross-referencing. "Remind me again what a FnorbFactoryFactory does?". Or, "who is calling this crap, and why?".
I have all related keystrokes firmly committed to motor memory.
@janschiefer Oh, I'm not even talking about that part! Certainly it is helpful to move around to find out what a block of code is referencing, but I'm saying even mentally parsing the block of code is easier when there's more syntactic structure (to a point, of course), and figuring out what it's doing comes after that.