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Questions tagged [language-ergonomics]

Use this tag for questions about human factors of language design such as usability and programmer effectiveness of particular features

17 votes
0 answers
413 views

What impact do type sigils have on programmers?

Some languages, such as BASIC (STRING$), Perl ($scalar, @array, ...
Michael Homer's user avatar
  • 13.1k
3 votes
4 answers
422 views

What evidence exists on using & and | as logical operators instead of && and ||?

I’m working on a small, dynamic language that isn’t going to include bitwise operators so I was thinking it was a bit unnecessary to use && and ...
user avatar
18 votes
5 answers
3k views

What should be included in error messages?

New users of a language will spend a lot of their time staring at error messages, and realistically so will the language designers. These messages should be an early consideration, given that adding ...
BoppreH's user avatar
  • 1,441
13 votes
5 answers
406 views

What strategies did Go use to circumvent the lack of generics?

Go (was) famous for its lack of generics. However, the lack of generics in a statically typed language makes quite a few things harder. For example (in a pseudocode because I don't know Go): ...
Seggan's user avatar
  • 2,743
16 votes
2 answers
386 views

Is colorForth's unique syntactic approach helpful to the programmer?

colorForth, from Forth creator Chuck Moore, is a dialect of Forth where colour of the source text is semantically important. There is no typical syntax: programs are pure sequences of words, where the ...
Michael Homer's user avatar
  • 13.1k
8 votes
3 answers
236 views

Should a concatenative language use prefix or postfix term ordering?

Concatenative languages compose subprograms (nonempty sequences of terms) by appending one to the other. Most of these languages use postfix notation, like in Forth: ...
Michael Homer's user avatar
  • 13.1k