Gregory's ServerYou (uninspired, bland, predictable): syntax highlighting with colours.
Me, (innovative, experimental, pushing the envelope): syntax highlighting with fonts.
 50 comments
 Look, I'm just saying that in the end, all those people who said "if code is hard to write it should be hard to read" stepped to the threshold and turned away in cowardice. They never fully embraced their iconoclasm, could not will themselves to push their ideology to its logical conclusion. But here, today, I have lit the path they could not bring themselves even to set foot on. Bring me Comic Sans, Papyrus, Impact, Curlz MT and Wingdings. If code was hard to write, it should hurt to see.  @mhoye Back in the late 90s I set my terminal font to something whimsical like comic sans but actually readable, to trick my brain into not taking code as seriously as if I was reading a textbook. I thought it would make debugging easier because I subliminally would be more skeptical of what I was reading. Honestly I think it worked.   @mhoye I think trying out worst ideas in an Oblique Strategies way is one of the best ideas. @mhoye (also attempting zero side effects, purely functional, purely deterministic, and using pattern matching instead of if-else conditionals, and anything else I think to add that frees me from ever having to actually finish one of these pieces of "art")  @mhoye Now make the fonts part of the language syntax for an extra level of enlightenment.   @ollej @promovicz @mhoye y'all are really provoking me... i now need to make this happen @blogdiva @promovicz @mhoye Do it! :) Maybe different bold weights can indicate size of an int. The bolder the variable is, the more bits will be used for it. @ollej @blogdiva @promovicz arbitrary byte-length numbers but the number of bytes assigned is the number of n’s in “int”. Need an 8-byte integer? Easy, just declare an innnnnnnnt. @mhoye @blogdiva @promovicz I love it! It’s so convenient! And so easy to read, just count the n’s. @ollej @blogdiva @promovicz I think we’re on to something here - maybe the way to easily express precision accuracy preferences is with the number of Os and As in “float”? If we only care about large numbers, declare a floooooaat but if you need precision in very small numbers, just declare a flooaaaaaaat. @mhoye @blogdiva @promovicz Sounds incredibly practical! How about declaring the length of an array? How about out multiplying the number of a’s in the first position with the number of a’s in the second position? aaaarraay = an array of length 8. @ollej @mhoye @blogdiva @promovicz one could write [int, int, int] as a type, at which point (int, int, int) and [int, int, int] read kind of similar and one might as well abandon fixed-size arrays in favor of tuples. @ollej @blogdiva @promovicz think of the convenience, how suddenly easy it is to declare an aaaaarraaaaay of floooooaaaats. @ollej @blogdiva @promovicz tired: syntactic sugar. Wired: syntactic high-fructose corn syrup. @mhoye @blogdiva @promovicz Also, why only have ++ increment operator for adding one, just add more plus signs to increment with that amount. So +++ adds two and +++++ adds four. @mhoye @blogdiva @promovicz Lets bring an end to the discussion of using keywords or braces for blocks, we can use this instead dobegin{: }end And also requiring indentation with alternating tabs and spaces for each level of nesting. @mhoye @ollej @promovicz i ought to snitch on you to Eric Meyer (he's here but won't tag him because he doesn't need this nightmare scenario seared on his retinas) @blogdiva @mhoye @promovicz Who is he? And why wouldn’t he want a nightmare scenario seared into his retinas? @promovicz @mhoye The great thing about this is that we don’t need to prefix comments with // or # or anything. Just use that font and it will be ignored. Me (sane): proposing to use one font style per symbol. Artists (inspired): using each font only once per symbol. @mhoye 15 years ago, it was even worse: https://www.sourceinsight.com/#syntax-fmt they seem to have cleaned it up a bit    @lmorchard @mhoye Les, I think you want this: https://www.fontspace.com/st-francis-font-f6115 |
Great news everyone I've just had the worst idea.