Found on proggit: Krug, a new experimental programming language, compiler written in D

[Walter Bright]

On 4/26/2018 3:29 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> The theory goes:
> 
> A. "less syntax => easier to read".
> B. "There's no technical need to require it, and everything that can be removed 
> should be removed, thus it should be removed".
> 
> Personally, I find the lack of parens gives my brain's visual parser 
> insufficient visual cues to work with, so I always find it harder to read. And 
> regarding "B", I just don't believe in "less is more" - at least not as an 
> immutable, universal truth anyway. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not.

Haskell seems to take the "minimal syntax" as far as possible (well, not as far 
as APL which has a reputation for being write only). Personally, I find it makes 
Haskell much harder to read than necessary.

Having redundancy in the syntax makes for better, more accurate error 
diagnostics. In the worst case, for a language with zero redundancy, every 
sequence of characters is a valid program. Hence, no errors can be diagnosed!

Besides, redundancy can make a program easier to read (English has a lot of it, 
and is hence easy to read). And I don't know about others, but I read code an 
awful lot more than I write it.

I posit that redundancy is something programmers learn to appreciate as they 
gain experience, and that eliminating redundancy is something new programmers 
think is a new idea :-)

P.S. Yes, excessive redundancy and verbosity can be bad. See COBOL.