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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious. What do you (or other people) dislike about special characters. For me, they are more readable than text (maybe I should start writing APL ;-) ).

Granted, I'm dyslexic and apparently dyslexia only affects characters which are phonetic. This has also been my experience and I love Chinese characters in Japanese text because it's much more comfortable for me to read. So that's why I might prefer symbols.

I'm wondering, though, why people dislike symbols (and I know it's a very common thing). It's just like any other letter, except that it has a meaning. I wonder, it is because it's hard to read phonetically (just the opposite of my problem)? Whenever I've asked people they say "Symbols are ugly", which is kind of an unhelpful response. It's like saying, "I don't like it because it is unlikable". I hope someone has a slightly deeper insight into the reasons.

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I think you nailed it. I'm so comfortable seeing words that symbols can blur into the background and require extra effort to focus on. Languages with multi character symbols and chains of symbols add to the discomfort.

Once I've learned the language and internalized the semantics they mostly fade away, except in cases like C++ where you get multiple asterisks and whatnot.

I'm not the above poster but I also dislike the symbols usage I've seen in Rust. I'm on mobile so I can't show examples (and I don't know the language at all) but it has the same smell as symbols in C++ though not as bad. Like character silhouettes in Team Fortress 2, symbols need to appear distinct. Chains of them should be limited. My first impressions of Rust felt like the symbols or operators were less than ergonomic. Small or blending together.

Disclaimers about preference, solo vs team, personal vs enterprise, APL vs La-Z-Boy.

The more symbols used, the less it looks like a human-consumable language (note: "looks like", not "is").

The more symbols, the harder it is to unpack the code into (and restate in a) human language. Even in your head. IOW, if you're mostly monoligual, and you think about code in English (or whatever your preferred language is), more symbols can actually make it harder to think about the code.

Trivial example: a = a+b is slightly easier to say (and think) in English than a += b

> The more symbols used, the less it looks like a human-consumable language

I read this as “the more symbols used, the more it looks like mathematics”. I guess this is really a matter of personal taste :)

> Trivial example: a = a+b is slightly easier to say (and think) in English than a += b

Native English speaker here.

"+=" is pronounced "plus equals", meaning that you've got it backwards, with the margin being by the number of mental syllables taken by a - though if a really is "a", then that's only 1.

However, the above considerations only cover recitation.

Comprehension, especially in real-world scenarios, is another matter entirely. "a" might be some other, longer name (and probably amongst a set of long names with a common prefix/accessor). When I read "a = a + b", it takes me some amount of effort to verify whether the lvalue is in fact the same word as the lhs of the operator. When I read "a += b", that effort is not needed. The difference again is proportional to the length of a.

The most something follows the most intuitive way of making one thing, less arbitrarity and change for change itself, it might also be only noise, so the author can claim its a original work just because it uses a different sort of symbols. Byproduct of individuality and ego.

Most people can detect noise and arbitrarity. But if you are making something really original, giving you are being a pioneer into something, in that case you can define the direction of something, where that direction should serve as a guide to things that will follow.

I dont know about others, but my brain tend to be anti-noise (and i fell this pattern in a lot of other people too), because theres too much information for us to consume, that having to handle some people "cheating" to give a apparent originality, can make anyone who feel its the "noisy arbritrary sort of change" that is being presented, to dislike the "noise" almost immediatly.

Technology should be aiming toward zen-budism, less ego and therefore, less disonesty and less noise.

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