ASCII Addiction
Towards Higher Level Syntax for Programming Languages 2024-10-23
Most normal humans use two kinds of quotes for strings.
For example a begin-quote is denoted by “ and end-quote is denoted by ”.
Programmers, though, use the same kind of quote for both ends of strings. Programming languages usually insist on a pair of double-quotes, a pair of single quotes or a pair of back-ticks (", ', ` respectively).
Even the “new” programming language raku which purports to use Unicode characters in many places, still insists on using programmer-oriented kinds of strings, instead of using human-oriented strings.
This habit is a hold-over from the character-deprived days of ASCII (and EBCDIC).
In the 1950s, computer hardware was minimalistic and people couldn’t imagine wasting bits on menial details like representation of strings in programming languages.
Today, in 2024, though, we have significantly different hardware. We should have different attitudes towards this kind of minimalistic design, but, we cling to 1950s style biases. In the intervening decades, we’ve wasted a lot of human brain-power creating workarounds for such 1950s-inspired biases towards so-called “efficiency”.
What other 1950s biases still cloud our brains?
See Also
Leanpub [WIP]
Twitter: @paul_tarvydas
(only if you are interested)Thanks, What do you think of Raku, especially the grammar? Don't bother if you really haven't looked at Raku much