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Comment by david-given | Hacker News Reader

> It does mean that your brain thinks the audio.

I'm sorry, that's simply not true. At least for me. It may be true for you.

From the things you've said, I suspect you're a word-at-a-time reader, treating words as a sequential symbol stream, processing them as if they were speech. This is just one of the several different styles of reading. Others exist.

I am, as I mentioned above, a phrase-at-a-time reader. I take in multiple symbols at a time, and not necessarily in sequence. If I had to think through the audio of a phrase, this simply wouldn't work. It also means that I would be unable to read symbols that didn't have an audio equivalent.

Right now I'm working with Smalltalk. One of its operators is ~~. How is this pronounced? Don't know, don't care. It's just ~~. When I perceive it, I don't perceive 'tilde tilde'; it's a ~~.

(Also, if you aren't reading Scotland's worst poet aloud, you are wasting him.)

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I read more like a page at a time. Some might accuse me of being a page-at-a-time writer.

Compare the way you perceive "~~" to the way you perceive "++". I hear these as "sig sig" and "lus lus". (Or rather, as "slus," because that's a further Hoon abbreviation, but never mind.) You don't hear the former at all; but you hear the latter as "plus plus," don't you?

This is because "tilde tilde" is so heavy your brain doesn't want to do the work of hearing it out. But overriding that connection doesn't save energy, which is why you do hear "plus plus." Your brain has to think the very complicated little thought, "squiggle I don't want to pronounce." It would much rather have a sound.

It's torture enough to read McGonagall silently. Out loud? Who would try that? It's tantamount to suicide.

> You don't hear the former at all; but you hear the latter as "plus plus," don't you?

I really do not. A short silence, both of them. I suppose it depends on how you normally code. I have never had a need for speaking out code and am not well versed in it.

I experience reading similarly to you. I will often become familiar with written words before I know how to pronounce them. When I want to say the word for the first time, I will have to pause and think about how it would sound out loud.

This is especially true of code and symbols. For example, consider this poem

> is it already too dark > to play tennis with a racket > i asked? > while I code with [

and contrast with this one

> The house filled with laughter > from mother and daughter > Both were fiends > but neither friends

or even better, combine the two

> I never used a ~ > as well as Oscar Wilde

Yes, this is precisely my experience!

And the weird thing is that the little silences where symbols should go are all completely distinct.

Do you like, read code from left to right? You don't parse it visually straight into an AST? How do you subvocalize the parentheses in (x + y) * z?

In my head I pronounce it as "snake snake" which I think is OK for specialized operators like that. But on the whole I prefer to use Smalltalk keyword-syntax for more understandable method names. I think binary operators make sense for commonly used operations which are FREQUENTLY used. If they are not, better to use English. #*$!:-)

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