From: Hugh Sasse <hgs@...>
Date: 2005-10-29T02:04:13+09:00
Subject: Re: "Readability" inflation

On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, David A. Black wrote:

> Hi --
> 
> [...]  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
        [...]
> 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.

Agreed.
> 
> 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.

And it doesn't take much.  I mean, people often object to
pluralization in Perl by means of @collection and
$collection[member]

> 
> 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 
  [Compress the code by moving to a higher base :-)]
>
> 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.
> 

So what is so bad about introducing more keywords? Yes, they can
stamp on existing variables, but what if, just for parameter passing
we introduced "named" 

  # A factory method
  def create_pizza(t=[:pepperoni, :ham] named :toppings, 
                   c=[:thin] named :crust_thickness)
    imaginate(:pizza_factory).make_me(c,t)  # [1]
  end

nice short vars for codeing, then 

  # My toppings for today
  mt=[:ham, :cheese, :pineapple]
  pizza = create_pizza(mt named :toppings)

There's no ambiguity with past forms, and the syntax is still fairly
English. (On the basis that the rest of Ruby is fairly English: I'm
not suggesting people should fit to my linguistic bias.)

Ruby has very few keywords now.  I know this might upset things that
talk to name daemons, because they already have the named string
inside the code, but if it improves readability it might be a price
worth paying.

        Hugh
[1]
http://www.toolshed.com/blog/articles/2004/09/01/imaginate-the-article