Hacker News Reader

Comment by adossi | Hacker News Reader

You could say that about anything, though. Why use punctuation and capitalization when typing forum comments? Its just syntax after all.

View on HN

Why use many word when few word do trick

Because you don't know if they've done the trick. That's why natural language is padded with extra words to add context and help rule out misunderstandings. The grammatical rules of agreement are one mechanism to do this.

And you can see the phenomenon of over-abbreviation by reading a few debates on twitter and repeatedly seeing, "how can you not understand what I tweeted?!"

FYI you're replying to a joke from The Office (US) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-L9uhsBLM

No, that's a completely invalid objection. Punctuation in natural languages isn't just aesthetic, it changes meaning.

That's a mostly invalid counter-objection. Technically true, but with context its usually recoverable.

Punctuation, or lack of it, can change the meaning in programming languages too.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/codebyte-why-are-explicit-se...

Yeah, but no one would remove punctuation from a program because they think it looks nicer.

> Javascript developers

Oh, of course.

Don't forget gofmt.

I remove semicolons from JS b/c I feel like they are a bit of a hack. Except where it's required by the language (for loops, which are becoming less used quite rapidly), your code generally shouldn't be so complex as to require semicolons for readability.

Having said that, I've been introducing a lot more colons, since I use TypeScript.

I was referring to punctuation that is, in some way, actually necessary. No one ends their lines with semicolons in python although it's valid. The rules when the interpreter will "insert" them are obvious. Not so in Javascript.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com