Follow-up post explaining research rationale

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 23:42:33 UTC, Joe Duarte wrote:

[snip]

As Adam pointed out, the merits of "Hello, world!" are not it's 
usefulness as a program, but it's role in making the newbie 
acquainted with the language, it's syntax and how to compile and 
run it. And it is often rewarding to absolute beginners, as they 
are happy that the computer does what they told it to do, even if 
it's as trivial as printing "Hello, world!" to the screen.

I have the feeling that your basic assumption is that humans are 
quite stupid and that characters confuse them, if they have a 
different meaning in a different context. "OMG '$' does not mean 
"dollar" here! Quick bring in the therapy dog!" Context is the 
keyword. When I write "He sold the car for $2,000." I know it's 
about money. When I write D code such as

myArray[1..$]  // => myArray[1..myArray.length]

I know it's not about money. It's about the length of the array. 
I once helped a young student with Perl, she needed it for 
biology. She understood the concept of hash tables ("like a 
dictionary") and she wasn't confused about the "$" sign. People 
are not that thick, you know. It's the context. When I read a 
text in Spanish I know which sound is represented by the grapheme 
<ñ>. When I read in Portuguese the same sound is represented by 
<nh>, and then again in Galician the grapheme <nh> represents the 
sound /ɳ/. It's the context, and of course humans are capable of 
assigning different meanings or values to the same symbols in 
different contexts and keep them separate.