leah & nybbles & bytes, oh my! on Nostr: one of the worst things about computer language development is that with a few ...

one of the worst things about computer language development is that with a few blessed exceptions, everyone seems to think their shiny new language has to look like C to be acceptable.

C's syntax isn't magic. it's not even that well thought through; Dennis Ritchie openly regretted its declaration syntax, but apparently too late to reverse course in the way he did when he realised that writing the increment operator =+ was a mistake. (incidentally, those operators? came from it being more efficient to implement in the threaded code to which B compiled; they predated both the PDP-11 and, well, C. but they were, nonetheless, not a good idea, sacrificing clarity to terseness.) but it feels like every new language adopts it slavishly, and sprinkles its own mix of shiny sparkles on top of it.

declarations, being things that should only ever be written once, can afford to be loquacious.

for everything else, there's no excuse for writing anything but a name. let the declaration do the work.