Comment by chrsw
7 days ago
Language syntax is like the weather. When it's good (or when you're acclimated to it, I guess) you don't notice it. When the weather is perfect you don't even feel like the atmosphere even exists. When a language is so ingrained in your mental models, you don't even notice syntax, you just see semantics.
In the follow up article, I wrote something like this in the conclusion:
> Designing a language is more than just getting the syntax right, and denotation semantics are a lot more important in most ways, but that does not mean syntax does not matter. When you get syntax right, people won’t even know you’ve done anything at all. But when you’ve got it wrong (and have actually tried using the language), they will complain instantly.
Follow-up Article: https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/02/21/does-syntax-ma...
True to any design in general.