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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>But at its worst, PL notation obfuscates: a page of symbols is an opaque barrier to entry.

The assumption here is that this is a bad thing. But there's a reason we have doors, gates, locks and so on -- other "barriers to entry".

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> But there's a reason we have doors, gates, locks and so on -- other "barriers to entry"

Yes, because we don't want people to get into our house.

Are you seriously suggesting a world where we want to make it harder for people to understand programming language literature?

> Are you seriously suggesting a world where we want to make it harder for people to understand programming language literature?

I'd like the barrier for entry to be a bit higher if I'm honest. Maybe then I wouldn't have to work with code created by so many idiots.

My experience is that the people who hold this sort of view produce the worst output and are the least willing to improve it. Make of that what you will…

We're talking about literature related to programming language design not Stack Overflow here.

More people able to understand the literature means more people who can contribute and contribute effectively. That means better programming languages, better tooling and better educated people.

We have all been "idiots" at some point. Gatekeeping is how you kill a field by removing all the beginners who might one day produce the next big development.

I don't think making the barrier higher is gonna solve your "issue". I think you'll only achieve having less developers overal.

I've worked with some brilliant booksmart people that produced god aweful code. Being able to understand literature/notation isn't going to make you a better developer by default. There's a lot more that goes into it than that.

This opinion is often followed by laments that their favorite language has only a tiny niche audience and no major accomplishments outside of some academic examples, while some clearly inferior language with a low barrier to entry is inexplicably way more popular than their preferred language.

The solution to that isn't to make programming harder, but to make writing poor quality code harder. That's also in part, indirectly, a notation problem.

Or ideas in general, should we ever gate keep the dissemination of ideas and knowledge? Innovation is more likely to occur when people cross disciplines and they can only do that if it is approachable, it is gradual and discoverable. Simple is hard, simplistic is easy. Someone is going to come back with essential vs accidental complexity [1] but we can always strive for simpler, more cohesive ways to exchange knowledge. How much of our current notation systems are essential? And when do they diverge for non-essential reasons? Computer systems form primarily around notation (language and syntax), so notation is definitely important [z]

In the post the author mentions an excellent talk by Guy Steele that goes over issue of notation and balkanization titled, "It's Time for a New Old Language" where he outlines "the history and current status of computer science metanotation". [2]

Notation, like syntax is important, but like a plethora of ill defined and specified Domain Specific Languages (DSL), notation also needs to be defined, regular and learnable. For notation takes words and turns them into pictures that compose into thought structures that cannot be expressed in human written language to the same specificity. Think Feynman [3] and Railroad [4] Diagrams, or musical notation [5]

The abstract explains it beautifully,

> The most popular programming language in computer science has no compiler or interpreter. Its definition is not written down in any one place. It has changed a lot over the decades, and those changes have introduced ambiguities and inconsistencies. Today, dozens of variations are in use, and its complexity has reached the point where it needs to be re-explained, at least in part, every time it is used. Much effort has been spent in hand-translating between this language and other languages that do have compilers. The language is quite amenable to parallel computation, but this fact has gone unexploited.

[1] https://simplicable.com/new/accidental-complexity-vs-essenti...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HKbjYqqPPQ

slides, https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/St...

paper, https://sci-hub.st/10.1145/3155284.3018773

[3] 6 minute video from Fermilab on Feynman Diagrams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk1cOffTgdk

[4] https://sqlite.org/syntaxdiagrams.html

[5] https://www.mfiles.co.uk/music-notation-history.htm

[z] Wadler's Law

Besides being beginner unfriendly, barriers to entry end up making things worse off for everyone by reducing productivity and efficiency.

There's no reason to consider barriers a good thing, unless one has a motive to restrict use of programming languages. Why would one want that?

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