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Comment by HoLyVieR | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I'm the only one, but I hate with passion this trend to remove syntax from a language and call it an improvement. It may be easier to code, but the code you produce is often more cryptic and harder to maintain. The aspect of the maintainability of a language is often disregarded even tough it's a very important aspect. That project is a very good example of this. Sacrificing readability for a few keystroke is never a good trade-off.

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Personally, I completely agree. Code is written once and read often, so when working with any codebase where contributors > 1, readability should win over writability every time.

This should not be an argument against language constructs which make languages more expressive, but there seems to be a trend where as languages move toward the functional end of the spectrum, they take on more and more terse and cryptic syntactical structures.

I've always felt that good code should read like a book. This can be reconciled with prefix notation, but not with overloading odd characters as operators.

Isn't the aim here to improve readability?

By which measure is

    <- 2

easier to read than

    return 2

There are many more examples in the code, but I generally found the PHP code MUCH easier to read, and I don't know PHP very well. It could be that I'm biased towards C-like languages, but I doubt it; words are a lot easier to read than arbitrary symbols.

I wouldn't have blinked if it was:

^ 2

since that is what is used in Smalltalk, but the left arrow makes me think I am missing what it should point to.

In ruby you could just write

assuming you're at the end of a function. Coffeescript is the same iirc.

I've never written a line of php code in my life but on my current project I was asked to port some code from my client's php server api to native Obj-C running in an app. I had no trouble reading the php code and had the port working in under a day.

The original reason for "<-" was to have it implement a "inner return", that should be "<--". Now I think there should only be one return type, but "<-" still looks ok to me as it points the value back as trying to "return" it :)

If it is, it isn't working.

With a passion? Kind of over the top don't you think? Snow is just a tool like php is just a tool. We're all programmers just trying to make development easier for ourselves and hopefully others. I don't know how anyone can hate any aspect of programming with a passion. It's our modus to find things we dislike and we write tools to prevent us from ever having to do them again.

What I hate is the trend to overlook maintability of the code just to get something that will take less keystroke to write.

People are creating new language in good faith and they want their language to look nice. I don't think anyone can disagree on that. The problem is that the aspect of the maintability of the code is overlooked in the process of the creation. When you overlook this aspect it may not hurt you in the short term, but it hurts in the long term. It may be nice for you to code something in a way now, but everyone that will have to maintain your code may not find it nice to read.

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