Typing words is faster than symbols for most folks even without an IDE. Typing `&{% takes way longer than “static long foo”.
> People who are fluent in reading languages written with alphabet systems don't read letter-by-letter, but instead read word-by-word, using effortless word recognition.
It all adds up. Languages like COBOL, PASCAL or ADA (originally designed for terminals with very limited character sets, sometimes even lacking lowercase text - thus requiring case-insensitive syntax) make it a lot harder to survey larger code blocks.
> It all adds up.
If that's true, I would expect logographic writing systems to cause less reader fatigue than alphabetic writing system. But as far as I'm aware that isn't the case, and the two are roughly equivalent.
As far as I know, Chinese speakers read texts on average faster than English speakers
One of the most readable languages that I've ever seen is XQuery, which is also very verbose, and prefers keywords over punctuation.
I wouldn't even say that. Using words (or multi-letter symbols generally) may be more to type, but virtually everybody uses editors with completion features and those completion features tend to work better with words than symbols. Furthermore, despite there being more characters, I don't think it's actually more to read. People who are fluent in reading languages written with alphabet systems don't read letter-by-letter, but instead read word-by-word, using effortless word recognition.