this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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No programming language is “natural/obvious/without effort”.
You could say that about anything. Of course you have to learn something the first time and it's "unintuitive" then. Intuition is literally an expectation based on prior experience.
Intuitive patterns exist in programming languages. For example, most conditionals are denoted with "if", "else", and "while". You would find it intuitive if a new programming language adhered to that. You'd find it unintuitive if the conditionals were denoted with "dnwwkcoeo", "wowpekg cneo", and "coebemal".
Languages also have inner consistency. E.g. the mentioned python len function is inconsistent with the rest of the same language - and that is a statement that is true in itself, without an external reference point.
Yes, I agree that the
len()thing in Python, and inconsistency in general, is bad. But pretty much all popular languages have many inconsistencies.But there are languages that require varying degrees of effort to become natural. Something like Malbolge will pretty much never be natural while something like Python can become natural to you in a few days.
Yeah. The original comment was about programmers who say that a language is “unintuitive” because it doesn't look like another language they know.