Does a Language Visually Need Algol syntax?
Squint your eyes, and look at a page of code
Posted by 05/23/2006
This is kind of stupid, but I was trying to think of what languages look like when you squint. The vague impression you get when you first open a file. How the eye moves. At first I just tried screen shots shrunk down - then I tried screenshots blurred. But I couldn't reproduce the mental affect. So I just scrawled out some rough pictures. I just tried 3 languages. Because I was really just trying to illustrate something I perceived - that maybe there is a good reason that the 'parenthesis languages' seem so weird. This is what I came up with:
| Python | Ruby | Scheme |
|
|
|
Not the best drawings in the world. What I noticed was Python struck me as thinner
than Ruby. Almost whispy in comparison. Ruby always looks like short, stubby methods. And
Scheme, is big blobs or clouds of code that migrate to the right. Nothing jumps out at you
as a structure. Maybe this is why people are annoyed by the parenthesis. No variation
to the eye. Just little symbols like * or worse ` - the
Python and Ruby have structure. They tell you something about their meaning by their
visual organization.
Maybe languages need some smatterings of Algol syntax - just for the eye - and just for the brain - to make a structure immediately apparent. Looking at a Ruby file it is immediately apparent what the main structures are. Your eye goes straight to them. Maybe this is better. Maybe not.
Comments
Post a comment