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A comment on Programming language notation is a barrier to entry. Parent comment

Re:Programming language notation is a barrier to entry by striking on Thursday October 01, 2020 @01:37PM (#24653855)
I'm pretty sure I hated writing Perl before, during, and after I was any good at it. It's unnecessarily full of ultra dense symbols, many of which are made dense for no reason. ($| means "hot pipes" means you want to flush all characters always. Set it non-zero to make it do that. Want saner names? Why don't you `use English;`, you rube?)

Sure, being a beginner is a temporary situation, but let's not excuse absurdities and unnecessary convolutions as a result.

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Re:Programming language notation is a barrier to entry by the_af on Thursday October 01, 2020 @02:39PM (#24654595)
It goes implied in pg's remark, and my own opinion, that the notation must be good for practitioners. It's of course possible for notation to be plain bad for everyone.

The argument actually says "don't optimize notation for beginners, optimize for practitioners". It doesn't imply making things difficult for beginners on purpose; just that they are not the priority.

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Re:Programming language notation is a barrier to entry by striking on Thursday October 01, 2020 @04:01PM (#24655572)
I understand that, I read the remark. But you were replying to a comment about Perl, and I want to make it clear that there are plenty of people and languages that make excuses in favor of practitioners when it's convenient and that they shouldn't.

I just don't even think it's a useful remark because you can just claim people you disagree with are beginners and people you agree with are practitioners and now anything can be argued.

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Re:Programming language notation is a barrier to entry by the_af on Thursday October 01, 2020 @04:14PM (#24655691)
I wasn't commenting on perl, in case there's any confusion.

I wouldn't call people who disagree with me on PL design issues beginners. I would call beginners beginners. It's not a matter of disagreeing, it's a matter of experience and time working on real projects with a language.

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