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Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall!
theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"
Have you ever used a visual diagrammatic code language before, such as LabView? Every scientist I've ever met that had any experience writing code vastly prefers the C based LabWindows to the diagrammatic LabView - diagrammatic is simply a fucking pain in the ass. Reading someone else's program is an exercise in pain, and they are impossible to debug. Black and white, unambiguous plain text coding may not be pretty to look at but it is damn functional. Coding requires expressing yourself in an explicitly clear fashion, and that's what the current languages offer.
Incredibly, I worked for a major investment company who had, indeed, done something useful in APL. In fact they had written their entire set of analysis routine in it, and deeply interwoven it with SQL. I had to untangle it all. (Would you beleive they had 6 page SQL stored procedures? No, nor did I - but they did).
APL is great sometimes - especially if you happen to be a maths whizz and good at weird scripts. Not exactly easy to debug, though. Sort of a write-only language.
For the last ten plus years, we have been steadily moving in the direction of more human readable data - the move to XML was supposed to be a huge improvement. It meant you could - sort of - read what was going on at ever level. It also meant we had a common interchange between multiple platforms.
So you want to chuck all that away to get better symbols for programming? No, I don't think so.
I must point out that the entire canon of English Literature is written in - surprise - English, and that's definitely ascii text. I don't think it has suffered due to lack of expressive capability.
What does supriose me, though, is how fundementally weak our editors are. Programs, to me, are a collection of parts - objects, methods, etc, all with internal structure. We seem very poor at further abstracting that - why, oh tell me why, when I write a simple - trivial - bit of Java code, do I need to write funtions for getters and setters all over the place - dammit, just declare them as gettable and settable - or (to keep full source code compatibility) the editor could do it. Simply ,easily, tranparently. And why can't the editor hide everything except what I am concerned with?
Microsoft does a better job of this in C#, but we could go much, much further. We seem stuck in the third generation language paradigm.
"Cats like plain crisps"
COBOL was originally designed so that managers and customers could read it. But in practice they rarely did because programming logic is typically too low-level and requires knowing the technical context to understand by a non-programmer and/or non-team member anyhow. Being "English-like" or grammatically proper didn't really help that goal in practice. This is why the idea was abandoned in later languages.
Perhaps it's comparable to legalese. Making it proper English doesn't necessarily improve readability by non-lawyers. It's still gibberish to most of us without a legal background.
It's not worth-while to slow down production programmers in a trade for the rare case where non-programmers will want to read code for an actual need (not just curiosity). Thus, it's an uneconomical requirement as long as there is such a trade-off.
Table-ized A.I.
Apple's documentation in HTML form has a few of the standard ASCII characters replaced with other unicode characters. If you copy and paste into a text editor, you get compiler warnings which seem to be saying that they're expecting the character that is there. They also sometimes contain ligatures, which you don't notice unless you look one character at a time. One of the most irritating problems I found was on the Nouveau wiki a load of constants have 0x prefixes where the x is actually a unicode multiplication symbol. Copy them into the code and it looks right, but the compiler rejects it as an invalid constant type.
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