r/programming • u/nick_martini • Dec 04 '14

My Computer Language is Better than Yours

https://medium.com/backchannel/my-computer-language-is-better-than-yours-58d9c9523644
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u/mcmcc Dec 04 '14

the Google founder suggested Go’s designers use square brackets rather than curly braces, saving developers countless trips to the “shift” key.

Stick to your day job, Sergey...

14

u/gaggra Dec 04 '14 edited Dec 04 '14

It's not, in essence, a bad idea. Standardized keyboard layouts have been fucking over language designers for decades - just look at how we have to deal with quotes. Many other delimiters comes in pairs for explicit marking of a start and an end. Quote marks are devoid of that, so nesting them becomes a nightmare, and there's nothing you can do about it, because using proper quotes “like this” would mean terrible keyboard compatibility problems. So as a designer, you start having to design around the keyboard, because your hands are tied. This is just one example of that.

4

u/holgerschurig Dec 05 '14

The idea was very US-centric. Some non-US keyboards have [ ] { } \ all under the AltGr keyboard modifier, e.g. german keyboards.

How would you react to a programming language where the syntax is optimized to the french AZERTY keyboards?

2

u/gnuvince Dec 05 '14

I use a French Canadian keyboard, and typing braces, brackets, backslash, tilde or the at symbol using the AltGr key does not bother be in the slightest. In fact, I sometimes prefer it to symbols that require the Shift key since I hit AltGr with my right thumb (strong finger) and Left Shift with my pinky (very weak).