On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 11:17:51 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 14:57:02 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > wrote: > >> What you are missing is that programmers spend 90% of their time > >> reading code > >> 10% writing code > >> You may well be in the super-whiz category (not being sarcastic here) > >> All that will change is upto 70-30. (ecause you rarely make a mistake) > >> You still have to read oodles of others' code > > No, I'm not missing that. But the human brain is a tokenizer, just as > > Python is. Once you know what a token means, you comprehend it as that > > token, and it takes up space in your mind as a single unit. There's not > > a lot of readability difference between a one-symbol token and a > > one-word token. > Hmmm, I don't know about that. Mathematicians are heavy users of symbols. > Why do they write ∀ instead of "for all", or ⊂ instead of "subset"? > Why do we write "40" instead of "forty"? > > Also, since the human brain works largely with words, > I think that's a fairly controversial opinion. The Chinese might have > something to say about that. > I think that heavy use of symbols is a form of Huffman coding -- common > things should be short, and uncommon things longer. Mathematicians tend > to be *extremely* specialised, so they're all inventing their own Huffman > codings, and the end result is a huge number of (often ambiguous) symbols. > Personally, I think that it would be good to start accepting, but not > requiring, Unicode in programming languages. We can already write: > from math import pi as π > Perhaps we should be able to write: > setA ⊂ setB Agree with all examples -- chinese being the best! Something that Chris may relate to: You type a music score into lilypond Then call lilypond to convert it into standard western staff notation Why not put up the lilypond (ASCII) directly on the piano/organ when you play? This is far from rhetorical... ABC,Guido,etc (not python's!) have some claim to be *musically* (not just textually) readable and easier to master than standard staff notation Still for someone - used to staff notation - under the standard presumptions of western music: -- harmony -- spelling c# ≠ d♭ -- a note is a note ie C to D is as much a note as D to E staff notation is hard to beat -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
