Questions tagged [language-ergonomics]
Use this tag for questions about human factors of language design such as usability and programmer effectiveness of particular features
6
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What impact do type sigils have on programmers?
Some languages, such as BASIC (STRING$), Perl ($scalar, @array, ...
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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 ...
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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:
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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 ...
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5
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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):
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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 ...
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