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Comment by thu | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I see someone seriously dismiss, and choose, a programming language based solely on its syntax. Also the first time I see one to pretend Haskell makes it more difficult to express oneself because of the syntax.

Surely, you were talking about the comments syntax. They really make it horrible to express anything.

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> This is the first time I see someone seriously dismiss, and choose, a programming language based solely on its syntax.

You've never read a Lisp thread with non-Lispers, have you? :-) The amount of whining about parentheses is incredible.

To be fair, as a non-Lisper that knows Lisp, it's all about the libraries and the language-as-a-platform.

If WordPress was written in Lisp, I'm sure many more people would use it. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem, I guess.

I've also seen an incredible amount of judgmentalism applied to Objective-C's message passing syntax. Does it look foreign to a speaker of classical C? Absolutely. But I found that pressing through the initial shock, I've come to realize that it's just another language syntax, and not particularly hard to either understand or type.

I choose every language I use based on the expressiveness of the syntax. What other reason is there to choose a language?

Usually, expressivity in a programming language is not really a matter of syntactic constructs but a matter of semantic constructs. But choosing a programming language involves much more than semantic (or syntax). Depending on the situation, community, compilers and tools, libraries, consultancy houses, documentation and books, are all reasons to choose or not a language.

Some even says that the number of programmers available on the market for a language is important. I don't think it is a good reason but a related one is: your existing user base is composed of companies and consultancies with their own programmers; you can't abruptly choose a different programming language than the one they know.

I would disagree. Semantically, we're reaching a point where most popular languages have a similar feature set (semantically speaking), and as new semantic constructs are created, they're quickly ported to other languages.

I agree with you about the 'platform' of a language, though. That's one of those things that you can't get away from.

Semantics.

Why choose a language with good semantics if the syntax is awful?

Most languages today offer the same semantics - first class functions, objects, namespacing. Apart from that core, there isn't really a huge variance except for fringe languages that, generally, have severe syntactical limitations as a result.

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