A Random Walk Through Geek-Space
This is a syntax bike-shedding post, where I will try to explain why I think languages should stop using curly brackets for code blocks. I don’t expect anyone to come away completely blown away by this or anything, but I’m a language nerd and often end up discussing in-development languages with their designers. And since approximately 90% of all language discussion is about syntax, I’ll just write a reusable note on brackets here. J
Brackets are awesome because you can use them to group things in a way that visually resembles the contents being “grabbed” from both directions. This serves to isolate the contents visually, and allows for nesting. Observe:
How awesome is that? It’s immediately clear just visually that ‘a’ and ‘b’ belong together, and that they’re nested inside another pair with ‘c’. There are several kinds of brackets, we could use curly brackets and they work just as awesomely at grouping and nesting things:
The reason this works is because the brackets visually look like they are physically containing any horizontal content between them due to the “grasping” nature of the brackets themselves, and the mirror-symmetry.
