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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

This type of bikeshedding behavior is a sign of technical immaturity. The more technical experience one gains, one usually becomes a lot more disinterested about small syntactic technical details of programming languages and more interested about larger abstract concepts (e.g. discussions on Monads, type theory, "everything is an expr" etc...)

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Zero- versus one-based indexing actually matters somewhat for correctness. The real trivial ‘small syntactic technical’ bikeshedding is braces versus indentation (and: which kind of indentation) or semicolons versus no semicolons.

Semicolons vs. end of line (like in Python) has a significant difference on what kinds of things you can express. End of line based syntax strongly discorages long lines, what brings problems and benefits. (And the Javascript choice is simply wrong.)

Semicolons vs. indentation structure (like in Haskell) has a huge usability difference in interactive shell. It's trivial on editor code.

The dismissal of syntax as trivial is not a good line of thinking. Syntax tends to have surprising impacts on semantics.

yeye, "HN" tends to abstract everything to the point that sometimes I do wonder how Java is not the church language of HN, also I do wonder whether people here still write code, or just became "architects".

So, there's nothing wrong with challenging common norms - remember NULL? XML oriented programming?

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