On syntax

Forget about what programming languages you know. What syntax do you wish you could write in? (Names have been changed to protect the innocent):

This?

    function generate_fibonacci_sequence( $length ) {
        for( $l = array(1,1), $i = 2, $x = 0; $i < $length; $i++ )
                $l[] = $l[$x++] + $l[$x];

        return $l;
    }

What about this?

    sub fibo
    {
        my ($n, $a, $b) = (shift, 0, 1);
        ($a, $b) = ($b, $a + $b) while $n-- > 0;
        $a;
    }

Getting better?

    def fib(n):
        if   n < 2: return 1
        else      : return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)

Hmm, isn’t this going backwards?

    (define fibo
     (lambda (x)
       (if (< x 2)
         x
         (+ (fibo (- x 1)) (fibo (- x 2))))))

Finally:

    fib 0 = 0
    fib 1 = 1
    fib n = fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)

If the programming languages of the future don’t look like the last example, I think we’ve failed. Programming languages are notation for describing solutions to problems. If that notation is verbose, clunky or full of special cases it should be abandoned in favour of a more concise notation. Real languages should look like pseudcode!

My suspicion is that in 50 years time we’ll look back on the syntax of today’s programming languages and think them highly bizarre, like looking back at Frege’s logic notation (pdf):

Syntax has come along way since the 1960s, but there’s still room for much improvement, looking at the widely used languages employed today. The designers of many (not all) popular languages seem to forget that syntax should be optimised for writing by humans, not for parsing by machines.