Re: Congratulations/Criticism

[James McCartney <asynth@xxxxxx>]

On Thursday, April 25, 2002, at 09:15  AM, Andreas Bogk wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I'm impressed, goo is a nice language.  Good job!
>
> But I have a nit to pick: why are all the names abbreviated?  I think
> it would increase readability to spell out things like "df" and "cat".
> It would also make it easier to catch up with the terminology of the
> language, and to guess the names of related functions and macros.


I must say this is also my criticism. If it looks like gobbledygook then 
you will not get a lot of adoption.
This will be a problem anyway because of s-exprs. I have a high 
tolerance for geek languages myself, but as someone who has designed a 
language used by musicians and composers, I think it really is 
beneficial to de-mystify things as much as possible and not assume that 
all of your users are up on all the comp-sci stuff. I've gotten a lot of 
very non-comp-sci folks into programming using first class functions and 
coroutines this way. Even I glaze over at things like 'elts' when there 
is a high density of these type of things.

Also I think it is good to use the qwerty keyboard as it was meant to be 
used, which is for typing letters. Dylan and GOO require too much use of 
the shift key and appear designed by or for those who can't type very 
well - lots of punctuation and abbreviated names. I think that this is a 
strength of Smalltalk, Forth and the post-LISP syntax functional 
languages - not a lot of parens and other punctuation and in Smalltalk 
at least, readable names. Those who write functional language 
programming examples appear to like to use one letter variable names 
which adds to gobbledygookness.

I know syntax is a flame topic, so go ahead..


--
--- james mccartney   james@audiosynth.com   <http://www.audiosynth.com>
SuperCollider - a real time synthesis programming language for the 
PowerMac.
<ftp://www.audiosynth.com/pub/updates/SC2.2.14.sea.hqx>