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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

Symbols are just other letters in the alphabet. Something like <‘_> is as natural for me to read at this point as any of the other words in this sentence.

Math is also symbol soup. But those symbols mean things and they’ve usually been designed to compose nicely. Mathematicians using symbols—just like writers using alphabets—are able to use those symbols to concisely and precisely convey complicated concepts to one another.

I guess my point is that symbols shouldn’t be looked at as inherently a positive or negative thing. Are they clear and unambiguous in their use? Do they map clearly onto coherent concepts? When you need to compose them, is it straightforward and obvious to do so?

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> Math is also symbol soup. But those symbols mean things and they’ve usually been designed to compose nicely. Mathematicians using symbols—just like writers using alphabets—are able to use those symbols to concisely and precisely convey complicated concepts to one another.

I just don't understand why one may take maths of all things as a positive example of something readable, when it's widely known to be utterly inscrutable to most humans on earth and even so many papers have differing conventions, using the same symbol for sometimes widely different or sometimes barely different things

Literally every language is inscrutable to most humans on Earth. But they all work fairly well for those in the club that know them!

I think many programming languages could benefit if we had an easy way to have both custom symbols and a convenient way to input them without extra friction. Take APL for example, once you know the language it's incredibly expressive, but the overhead to typing it is so strong that many use custom keyboards/caps.

I wish compose keys were more prevalent. There's something nice about typing -> and getting →

To be fair the basic ASCII keyboard is also default in US/Britain. And most people assume that's all they get.

I have always used the "international" version of the US English keyboard on Linux.

And I can enter all common symbols pressing altgr or altgr-shift. I also use right Ctrl as a compose key fore more. I would be hard pressed remembering what combo to press, after years it's just muscle memory.

But how do you find out what layout and what compose key does what? Good luck. It's as documented as gesture and hidden menus on iOS and MacOS. sigh.

Uiua (https://www.uiua.org/), broadly in the APL lineage, solves this problem nicely.

Like APL, it has a set of well-chosen symbols, but each symbol has an english name you can type just as you would a function name in another language, and it's automatically converted to the symbol when you run it.

Well, I wish I could find the ones I have seen in the wild.

Perhaps HRTBs and Fn traits, or double turbofish generics. I really cannot remember sadly.

Even something like foo::<‘_, [T]>() is just not that hard to follow. Again, the symbols involved all compose nicely and are unambiguous. And frankly, you just don’t need something like that all that often (and when you do, there are usually other alternatives if you’re really put off by the symbols.

Someone mentioned the use of ")?)?" (in terms of error handling), I am quite put off by this, too. :P

Anyways, I will try to look for the code, it is somewhere in my comment history but I have left way too many comments, so no promises.

I would one million percent rather type (and read)

    foo(bar()?)?

over something like

    if a, err := bar() { 
        return nil, err
    }

    if b, err := foo() { 
        return nil, err
    }

But also even better is just

    let a = bar()?;
    let b = foo()?;

I prefer ("if a, err := bar() {"), the same things you said applies here, too. I write a lot of Go and I can glance through it quickly, there is no cognitive overhead for me.

Edit: actually, it was someone else who said this: "Human brain has a funny way of learning how to turn off the noise and focus on what really matters.".

The difference is, there is no room for bugs with ?. Zero. None.

I have fixed (and frankly, caused) many bugs in golang code where people’s brains “turned off the noise” and filtered out the copypasta’d error handling, which overwrote the wrong variable name or didn’t actually bubble up the error or actually had subtly wrong logic in the conditional part which was obscured by the noise.

Frankly, learning to ignore that 80% of your code is redundant noise feels to me like a symptom of Stockholm syndrome more than anything else.

One symbol to replace three lines of identical boilerplate is no less explicit and dramatically clearer.

It's even nicer in Rust: there can be an "implicit" conversion between the error raised by foo and bar:

  fn foo() -> Result<(),FooError>
      bar()?
  
  fn bar() -> Result<(),BarError>

If FooError can be created from BarError, the compiler will insert the conversion call and errors bubbles up nicely.

Is it not caught by the compiler or linter though? Even variable shadowing is caught.

Some things are. Some things aren’t. At one point, you could write

    nil, err

without the return and it would happily compile. It’s also tragically easy for actual logic bugs to be obscured by all the boilerplate.

It’s not like three lines of error handling copypasta is some optimal amount. If golang required ten lines of boilerplate error handling, you’d still have just as many people arguing in favor of it because they “like it to be explicit” when it reality it’s verbose and the real underlying argument is that it’s what they’ve grown accustomed to. `?` is no less explicit, but it is less unnecessarily verbose.

What I can say here is that I am not one of these people who would argue in favor of Go's error handling were it 10 lines. shudders. I would definitely not use it, just like how I do not use Java for quite many reasons (unless I get paid for it, but would rather not). :P

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