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> I wish that all language design went through a filter where every character mattered like the designer was in an episode of Squid Game.

Yes, I totally support this! Coming from languages like Haskell, most languages look so unnecessarily noisy to me. Cut the fat!

> Anyone who proposes a way to minimize Lisp parentheses, who hasn't introduced a symbol for missing outline levels, is just pulling out chunks and hasn't used their system to write thousands of lines of code.

What are outline levels? I tried Googling it but didn't find anything.

> C syntax is ground glass in my eyes.

Is that a good thing? I'm not sure what you mean by it.

I think they mean that looking at it is like getting lots of tiny, ground-up pieces of glass in their eyeballs.

> Rob Pike famously explained that C needed its space-insensitive braces and semicolons in case code was transmitted through a channel that mangled whitespace.

Interesting.

And later when he (along with his collaborators) created Go, he moved with the times and avoided the need for semicolons.

Alongside they also shipped a tool that handles formatting so people can stop talking about that.

Not only that, afaik they pioneered/popularized a style of coding where the formatter is always correct, not the coder. This made coding on every language much more enjoyable and more efficient.

This is not something to write papers about, but a very significant thing anyway.

Anecdotal of course, but a teacher of mine worked on the original Ada compiler and said each dev had their own formatting rules. The SVN had an unformatted version and everyone could format it locally. Not the exact same, but pretty similar.

> my favorite syntax is a preprocessor that eliminates the need for most Lisp parentheses.

What's the preprocessor you're talking about?

Wisp, possibly

There are a number of those. See https://www.reddit.com/r/whitespaceLisp for a more complete list.

>Rob Pike famously explained that C needed its space-insensitive braces and semicolons in case code was transmitted through a channel that mangled whitespace.

But did he explain why it used semicolons, rather than periods, which would make more sense because a statement is basically a sentence?

Semicolons as statement terminator (or separator) are at least as old as Algol-60; C merely inherited that.

Periods are in struct.member identifiers and also in floating points. Using them again for end of statement would be complicated[1].

Imagine that your statements are "x = y.x = z." The compiler needs to figure out if that middle dot is saying "x member of y" or if it's a statement terminator.

[1]: It's already complicated by that reuse, which is, I assume, why identifiers can't start with digits so your parser can be simpler.

I assume that the statement terminator was chosen first, so they could've used something else for member access, such as `\`. Though I don't know about floats.

They could have used a comma for floats, as is common in many non-English-speaking countries. Although I guess that might become ambiguous with its use as a parameter separator.

Probably because periods are used in numbers already...

print 42.0

Smalltalk uses periods. One thing I like about C is that I can write .1 or 1. , but most languages these days force me to add the zero: 0.1 or 1.0 .

Other reasons for the a bit of noise: speed, simplicity and unambiguity of parsing. (Impacts compilation speed, ease of additional tool development, and ability to continue parsing partially incorrect code)

Nim, last I used it a couple of years ago, stopped at the first compilation error. It's not such a bad idea considering errors are usually fixed one-at-a-time.

I'd gladly trade a little compilation speed and ability to continue parsing incorrect code for a syntax without semicolons, braces, and other unnecessary characters. It's one of the things I really like about Python, though even that is starting to add lots of syntaxy glyphs.

yup that is why imba is superior to any other js based languages.