Thread by @moxie

Many trends in modern programming language design seem to focus on developers pressing fewer keys on the keyboard. To me, that's a strange priority.

For large systems where the industry spends most of its time, I think "readability" is much more important than "writability."
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For example, even simple features like "type inference" feel like misplaced priorities to me.

People say "it's annoying I have to write String foo = new String()," but realistically, you're more often writing "String foo = bar.getBaz()"

If that becomes "val foo = bar.getBaz()"

...what is "foo?"

"The compiler can figure it out!" they say. But what I care about is whether someone looking at the code can figure it out.

We're writing 3 fewer characters one time, at the cost of less information for the ~years people will have to read and understand it.

Languages designed for "writability" have function signatures that require you to press very few keys on the keyboard:

"def foo(bar):"

It's nice to press so few keys to write it, but error prone for the thousands of times people have to read/modify it.

Duck typing, no checked exceptions, type inference, last-statement-returns, etc etc require us to press fewer keys on the keyboard, but that is not the problem I see most organizations dealing with. Or if it is, I think giving everyone a copy of Mavis Beacon would do less damage.