From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2005-10-29T01:10:21+09:00
Subject: "Readability" inflation

Hi --

I'm writing this separately from any thread partly because it's a new
topic, and partly because I don't want to appear to be pouncing on any
particular post or person.  If anything, I'm pouncing on several of
each :-)  But really I'm just puzzling things through.

Over the years and, I think, particularly in recent months, there's
been a ton of suggestions for changing Ruby syntax.  The majority
involve adding new semantics through new punctuation.  Most of the
rest involve some kind of distillation of existing syntax into
something smaller.

Thus we've see talk of:

   lambda -> () {}
   ary.every.capitalize
   def some_method(:a: :b:,; c::d=:e => f) :-)

and so forth.

Ruby has always "sold itself" to programmers in large part because it
looks so good and, in the eyes of many, many people, successfully
balances expressiveness with clarity.  "Readability" is not an
absolute -- but the empirical evidence suggests that a lot of people
experience Ruby as very readable.

I'm certainly convinced that if even a few of the punctuation and/or
condensation things happen to the syntax, Ruby's reputation for
readability will decline rapidly and permanently.  I may be wrong, but
my belief and working hypothesis is that the "readability margin" is
quite narrow and easily erased.

That leaves me wondering why all these suggestions keep arising.

I think what's happening is that people who've used Ruby for a while
get used to it, and then they sort of shift their readability
threshold.  In other words, if you've seen this:

   a.map {|b| b.meth }

for several years, then even though it looked beautiful and concise
and transparent to you at first, it will start to look verbose and
syntactically inefficient.  So then you might want to have:

   a.every.meth {|b| (or implicit var, or whatever) }

Similarly, if you're used to:

   f = lambda {|a,b| ... }

then after a while, you might find that so natural that you feel
"ready" for

   f = lambda -> (a,b) { ... }

And yet... if you had encountered the latter version first, you would
never have had the feeling of balance and cleanness that you got (or
at least I did) from the former version.

So I think there's a kind of readability inflation going on: people
who are acclimatized to Ruby start feeling comfortable about going to
the "next" level of line-noise and/or compactness.

I'd like to sound a note of caution about this.  I think it has the
potential to disserve Ruby's interests, by moving the language away
from the thing that has been proven to be so attractive.

I've never been big on the idea of adding features to Ruby to make
newcomers "from" other languages feel at home.  But here, I am indeed
concerned about newcomers.  The point, though, is the same, but from
the other side: just as I do not advocate putting in C++, Java, or
Perl features to sweeten the pot for people considering Ruby, so I do
not advocate *removing* what I see as *Ruby* features (even at a
fairly fine-grained level).  I think either of these things can alter
the balance.

No, I do not think Ruby should stagnate and be dead.  If 1.8.3 were
the last version, it would not stagnate and be dead, because people
*use* it and do things with it.  The fact that, for me, that counts as
non-stagnation does perhaps mean that I am quite conservative about
language change.  I don't think the language needs to change, unless
something is truly broken or missing.


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net