Hey, Good Looking
08 May 2011
In a recent podcast on programming languages, Dan Benjamin claimed that he prefers to work with a language that ‘looks good’.
Dan used Objective-C as an example of a language that he abandoned due to its poor aesthetic qualities.
Co-host John Siracusa grudgingly conceded that aesthetic quality is a ‘good thing’ for a programming language because humans have a built-in trait of favouring beautiful things purely because of their beauty.
I think, however, that the beauty of a programming language may actually have a benefit in helping programmers understand code.
Here’s an example.
When reading prose I find that my brain subconsciously trips over poor grammar, sloppy sentence structure, incorrect punctuation and spelling mistakes.
Tenuous metaphors make my brain work harder and steal focus from the author’s message.
Ugly writing slows down my reading, comprehension and appreciation of the work.
Similarly, my brain stumbles over certain elements of programming languages.
In the past twelve months I’ve been writing Ruby and C# in even quantities. I’ve noticed that the extra ceremony and non-word characters in C# programs cause the same effect as badly written prose on my brain.
I find it costs me more effort to work with ‘ugly’ programming languages, simply because of the additional mental overhead caused by poor aesthetic qualities.