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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

Everyone agrees that "syntax doesn't matter", but implicit in that is "syntax doesn't matter, so let's do what I prefer". So really, syntax does matter. Personally I prefer the Rust/Zig/Go syntax of vaguely C inspired with some nice fixes, as detailed in the post. Judging by the general success of that style, I do wonder if more functional languages should consider an alternative syntax in that style. The Haskell/OCaml concatenative currying style with whitespace is elegant, but sufficiently unfamiliar that I do think it hurts adoption.

After all, Rust's big success is hiding the spinach of functional programming in the brownie of a systems programming language. Why not imitate that?

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That saying never made any sense to me either. After all syntax is your main interface to a language. Anything you do has to go through the syntax.

Some people say the syntax just kind of disappears for them after some time. That never seems to happen with me. When I am reading any code the syntax gets even more highlighted.

I always thought that languages (or at least editors) should allow the user to use whatever syntax they want! It's possible. Just look at Kotlin and Java... you can write the exact same code in both, even if you discount the actual differences in the languages. It's not hard to see how you could use Haskell, or Python syntax, to write the exact same thing. People don't like the idea too much because they think that makes it sharing code and reading code together harder, but I don't buy that because at least I myself, read code by myself 99% of the time, and the few times I read code with someone else, I can imagine we can just agree quite easily on which syntax to use - or just agree to always use the "default" syntax to avoid disagreements.

I dream to one day get the time to write an editor plugin that lets you read and write in any syntax... then commit the code in the "standard" syntax. How hard would that be?!

People who do a lot of deep work on code, particularly debugging and rearchitecting, tend to have opinions about syntax and code style that are more exacting. As one of those people I’ve always felt that the people working the code the hardest deserve to have an outsized vote on how to organize the code.

Would that potentially reduce throughput a bit? Probably. But here’s the thing: most management notice how the bad situations go more than the happiest path. They will kick you when you’re down. So tuning the project a bit for the stressful days is like Safety. Sure it would be great to put a shelf here but that’s where the fire extinguishers need to go. And sure it would be great not interrupting the workday for fire safety drills, but you won’t be around to complain about it if we don’t have them. It’s one of those counterintuitive things, like mise en place is for a lot of people. Discipline is a bit more work now for less stress later.

You get more predictable throughput from a system by making the fastest things a little slower to make the slow things a lot faster. And management needs predictability.

One of the reasons why I use Lisp is because the syntax helps me keep my mind organised. C-style syntax is just too chaotic for me to handle.

If you like C-like syntax and want a functional language that uses it, try Gleam: https://gleam.run/

Quite lovely looking code.

    fn spawn_greeter(i: Int) {
      process.spawn(fn() {
        let n = int.to_string(i)
        io.println("Hello from " <> n)
      })
    }

There's also Reason, which is basically OCaml (also compiles to JS - funnily enough, Gleam does that too.. but the default is the Erlang VM) with C-like syntax: https://reasonml.github.io/

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