> I am still perplexed by how people judge a language purely by its declaration syntax, and will decide whether to use the language purely based on whether they like that aspect or not.
Throughout the article, OP seems baffled that people have aesthetic preferences. Well, yes, of course we do; dealing with ugly things is the computer's job.
It also comes across like OP hasn't seen a lot of examples of really interesting language syntax, i.e. things outside, shall we say, the extended Algol family. The discussion seems to accommodate brace-less languages like Python, but not e.g. the Lisp or Forth families.
> and thus just becomes a question of ergonomics or “optimizing for typing” (which is never the bottleneck).
It might not be a bottleneck in terms of time needed. But unpleasant syntax is annoying and breaks flow. Thoughts creep in about how you wish the language looked different and that you didn't have to type these other bits. (Which is why a lot of people feel so strongly about type inference.)
> From what I gather, this sentiment of not understanding why many “modern” languages still use semicolons is either:
OP seems to conflate "semicolon" with "visible, explicit token that separates statements. There's no reason it couldn't be some other punctuation, after all. Describing Python's approach to parsing as "automatic semicolon insertion" is wild to me; the indented-block structure is the point and statements are full lines by default. Semicolons in Python are a way to break that rule (along with parentheses, as noted), which are rarely seen as useful anyway (especially given the multiple assignment syntax).
> To allow for things like Allman braces, Odin allows for extra single newline in many places in its grammar, but only an extra single newline. This is to get around certain ambiguities between declaration a procedure type and a procedure literal
Right; and the point of Python's approach is to not need braces in the first place, and therefore sidestep any considerations of brace style. And when you do that, it turns out that you don't need to think nearly as hard about whether a newline should terminate a statement. It's a package deal.
> Maybe I don’t need to be as cynical and it is a lot simpler than all of that: first exposure bias. It’s the tendency for an individual to develop a preference simply because they became familiar with it first, rather that it be a rational choice from a plethora of options.
> However I do think there are rational reasons people do not like a syntax of a language and thus do not use it. Sometimes that syntax is just too incoherent or inconsistent with the semantics of the language. Sometimes it is just too dense and full or sigils, making it very hard to scan and find the patterns within the code.
For what it's worth, before I ever touched Python I had already used (in no particular order) multiple flavours of BASIC, Turing, probably at least two kinds of assembly, Scheme, C, C++, Java and Perl. To be fair, I had also used HyperTalk and Applescript, so maybe that does explain why I glommed onto Python. But BASIC came first.
In my mind, a mid-line semicolon is exactly the kind of sigil described here, and an end-of-line sigil is simply redundant. Multi-line statements should be the explicitly-marked exception, if only because long statements should be less common than shorter ones.
> Throughout the article, OP seems baffled that people have aesthetic preferences. Well, yes, of course we do
I think Bill is astonished not really that people have aesthetic preference but that anybody's real preferences could be different from his. He supposes that, at most, these are false beliefs they should reject to reveal that their sincere preference is identical to his, the only correct preference.
Hello again. That's not my position in the slightest. The point of the article is to express how people will shallowly and naïvely judge something. It might be naïve conception of "aesthetics" but it's not even a good one.
It has nothing to do with people disagreeing with me, I have seen people dismiss numerous languages (not just my own) based on that declaration syntax. Things like "why does Rust not use `type name = value`? why did they have to change things so much from C++?".
Do you think these people are actually serious programmers or just having shallow and dumb opinions on things they know little to nothing about?
I tried my best to be very clear within this article that I am talking about two specific things: DECLARATION SYNTAX and SEMICOLONS. This does not extend to anything else. In fact I got so frustrated with people like yourself who are wrongly interpreting the article that way and extrapolating too much that I had to write a new article: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/02/21/does-syntax-ma...
"Does Syntax Matter?" And the first one is "Yes."
And all languages can have their declaration syntaxes categorized into one of the three I mention. This is not limited to ALGOLs. And I have come across "really interesting language syntax". I am not talking about that in this article.
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Ergonomics does matter and it's not just about optimizing for typing either. It's actually all about coherency and consistency, something I go into depth into the following article on syntax.
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I am not "conflating" a semicolon with statement terminators, I am using that as shorthand as most languages that most people encounter (not all languages, obviously) will use semicolons. Python's approach to parsing is a form of automatic semicolon insertion, even if most people don't think of it that way.
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And I do not like Python's approach requiring significant whitespace of "blocks" through indentation. I much prefer using something like braces, or an `end` keyword, etc, literally because it prevents the problems that significant whitespace introduces. I am not getting into that argument here; please don't start it.
Throughout the article, OP seems baffled that people have aesthetic preferences. Well, yes, of course we do; dealing with ugly things is the computer's job.
It also comes across like OP hasn't seen a lot of examples of really interesting language syntax, i.e. things outside, shall we say, the extended Algol family. The discussion seems to accommodate brace-less languages like Python, but not e.g. the Lisp or Forth families.
> and thus just becomes a question of ergonomics or “optimizing for typing” (which is never the bottleneck).
It might not be a bottleneck in terms of time needed. But unpleasant syntax is annoying and breaks flow. Thoughts creep in about how you wish the language looked different and that you didn't have to type these other bits. (Which is why a lot of people feel so strongly about type inference.)
> From what I gather, this sentiment of not understanding why many “modern” languages still use semicolons is either:
OP seems to conflate "semicolon" with "visible, explicit token that separates statements. There's no reason it couldn't be some other punctuation, after all. Describing Python's approach to parsing as "automatic semicolon insertion" is wild to me; the indented-block structure is the point and statements are full lines by default. Semicolons in Python are a way to break that rule (along with parentheses, as noted), which are rarely seen as useful anyway (especially given the multiple assignment syntax).
> To allow for things like Allman braces, Odin allows for extra single newline in many places in its grammar, but only an extra single newline. This is to get around certain ambiguities between declaration a procedure type and a procedure literal
Right; and the point of Python's approach is to not need braces in the first place, and therefore sidestep any considerations of brace style. And when you do that, it turns out that you don't need to think nearly as hard about whether a newline should terminate a statement. It's a package deal.
> Maybe I don’t need to be as cynical and it is a lot simpler than all of that: first exposure bias. It’s the tendency for an individual to develop a preference simply because they became familiar with it first, rather that it be a rational choice from a plethora of options.
> However I do think there are rational reasons people do not like a syntax of a language and thus do not use it. Sometimes that syntax is just too incoherent or inconsistent with the semantics of the language. Sometimes it is just too dense and full or sigils, making it very hard to scan and find the patterns within the code.
For what it's worth, before I ever touched Python I had already used (in no particular order) multiple flavours of BASIC, Turing, probably at least two kinds of assembly, Scheme, C, C++, Java and Perl. To be fair, I had also used HyperTalk and Applescript, so maybe that does explain why I glommed onto Python. But BASIC came first.
In my mind, a mid-line semicolon is exactly the kind of sigil described here, and an end-of-line sigil is simply redundant. Multi-line statements should be the explicitly-marked exception, if only because long statements should be less common than shorter ones.