Comment by mikkupikku
Comment by mikkupikku a day ago
It's like asking if the world should standardize on left handed or right handed screws as a default. There comes a point where the choice matters less than picking one at all.
Comment by mikkupikku a day ago
It's like asking if the world should standardize on left handed or right handed screws as a default. There comes a point where the choice matters less than picking one at all.
Bit that is more like standardizing on a language, not a syntax across languages.
I also don't think syntax is even a problem worth worrying about. It takes very little time to become accustomed to a new syntax. It's the semantics that are hard to learn. Difficulty syntax can often be helpful when learning a new language, as it serves as a reminder that the semantics are different.
Screw handedness is something that's basically always fine either way if planned for, and with largely no benefit for either option, so standardizing that is easy enough.
But, like, even then, there's screw drive (JIS vs phillips vs pozidriv vs a ton more) to worry about with screws. (never mind the obvious aspects of diameter & length; and whatnot else I happen to not know about)
The significant thing I think is that such trivial impactless questions just do not exist for programming languages. Even like comment starting characters is a messy question - "//" nicely aligns with "/* */" using the slash char, but "#" is a char shorter and interpreted languages need to handle "#!" as a comment for shebangs anyways. And things only get more complicated from there.
And, unlike with physical things, it's trivial to work with non-standardized things in software. Not like you're gonna copy-paste arbitrary code from one language into another and just expect it's gonna work anyway (else we wouldn't have more than one language).