What's in a Language?

What do developers want in a language?

• Lots of Available Resources / Documentation
• Large Standard Library
• Portability
• Speed of Development
• Easy to Read
• A Community of Developers

Yes, Easy to read. You'd really be surprised how much this helps a developer. Well over half the time a C++ Developer spends writing code is actually time spent deciphering what he's already written. Certainly the amount of time spent doing this decreases over time, but even if you've been reading C++ for 20+ years, there still is and always will be a lot of junk in the middle that subconsciously slows you down.

Solution? Whitespace.

Whitespace is fantastic. It's standard practice to use indenting all over the place. Why not use that as block delimiters? We do it anyway. Lets get rid of Curly Braces.

Here is a clip of C#. No shortcuts taken:

String output = new String();output = "Hello, World!";try {System.Console.WriteLine(output);}catch (Exception e) {raise;}

Here is the same clip of code in Python:

output = "Hello, world!"try:print(output)except:raise

Nicer, eh?