Comment by crabbone

I wish there was some sort of a single metric that would allow measuring languages against each other and thus determining the best one. Unfortunately, there are multiple variables and the relationship between the variables is unclear. But, going totally with my gut feeling, some examples of good languages (in terms of ease of reading) include:

* Prolog (and, by extension, Erlang).

* Pascal.

* Java 5 and earlier (and Go, as it's almost a Java's twin).

These languages somehow manage to hit the sweet spot of enough system and enough diversity, few unexpected syntax constructs (eg. Pascal or Java have the "dangling else" problem, but it's manageable compared to the problems introduced by optional statement delimiters in Go or JavaScript for example). In every case, a programmer must program defensively against these sorts of language "pathologies".

To give some examples of questionable or outright bad design decisions:

* In Common Lisp (and Scheme as well as a number of similar languages) there's a problem with identifying the open parenthesis that will be closed by typing the closing parenthesis. Programmers must invent tools and techniques to manage this problem.

* In C++, there's a laughable (or, at least was, for a long time) rookie "whoopsie" when it comes to ">>" in templates vs infix operator. And the "solution" offered by the language designer makes you think they were just... lazy (add space).

Here are also examples of some (perhaps, accidentally) good decisions:

* Kebab-case in many Lisp family of languages. In Latin script, the position of the hyphen in the middle of the lower-case letter is a better choice then, eg. underscore (which is tutted to be a "not a typographic character"). Same reason why, eg. in traditional Hebrew hyphens are at the height of a capital letter (Hebrew doesn't have lower-case letters and the shape of letters is better suited for hyphens at the top rather than the middle).

* Clojure as well as Racket (afaik, deliberately) introduced more kinds of parenthesis-like delimiters to make it easier to guess which expression is being terminated by the currently typed delimiter.

* * *

Note that this is a "superficial" metric, because languages are also valuable for concepts they are able to express both in terms of program logic as well as program application to the hardware it manages; the ability to process, modify, generate, analyze the language automatically; the ability to constrain the language to a desired subset of all available operations... Incorporating all of these into a single metric seems like mission impossible :)