> I don't like significant whitespace, personally ... (one of ideas is an) elimination of line noise*
Yay to that.
If you think about it, very few programming languages had legibility (readability) of the code as one of their design goals. Not through the natural language verbosity, but rather by reducing or eliminating the code needed to please the compiler and otherwise not related to the actual application logic.
D makes a good step forward in this direction (compared to C++), and so does Python. Java is close, but still pretty "noisy". Petrovich is the best there is, but it's not very practical.
This is an interesting subject, so if anyone has any thoughts on the matter, please post below.
I think at the end of the day, what is noise for one application domain is signal for another.
Have you heard of Concept programming? http://mozart-dev.sourceforge.net/cp.html I think the basic idea is that it somehow separates the domain-specific code from the code that pleases the compiler.
Python was designed with readability as a goal. That was the reason for significant white space rather than {}. On some European keyboards the braces had to be typed as triples. I don't find Java particularly readable even though I code in it every day.
a.equals(b) vs a == b
The antithesis of readability is APL, which is nothing but line noise. When it came out, you had to get a special printhead just to type it. You could make some unbelievable one-liners though.
Yay to that.
If you think about it, very few programming languages had legibility (readability) of the code as one of their design goals. Not through the natural language verbosity, but rather by reducing or eliminating the code needed to please the compiler and otherwise not related to the actual application logic.
D makes a good step forward in this direction (compared to C++), and so does Python. Java is close, but still pretty "noisy". Petrovich is the best there is, but it's not very practical.
This is an interesting subject, so if anyone has any thoughts on the matter, please post below.