Notcurses 3.0 Released For Adding "Bling" To Your Terminal Apps

[coder]

The Oxford comma rules, as does hyphenating three-word phrases, the art of the semicolon, etc. Punctuation may feel clunky as you write it out, but when reading it's ambiguity-eliminating low-friction comprehension oil.

What probably trips up many people is needing a comma before the "and", when len( list ) transitions above 2.

Perhaps what's needed is some simplified syntax that deviates from spoken English. For instance:

I love: my parents | Lady Gaga | Michael Larabel.

One benefit is that readers immediately know it's a list, unlike current syntax. However, when speaking, you need to scan for the last | to know where to insert the "and". Maybe the bug there is that spoken English also needs a good way to denote the start of a list. And, while we're at it, an audible list delimiter, rather than a mere pause.

[skierpage]

Perhaps what's needed is some simplified syntax that deviates from spoken English. For instance:

love: my parents | Lady Gaga | Michael Larabel.[/INDENT]

One benefit is that readers immediately know it's a list, unlike current syntax. However, when speaking, you need to scan for the last | to know where to insert the "and". Maybe the bug there is that spoken English also needs a good way to denote the start of a list. And, while we're at it, an audible list delimiter, rather than a mere pause.

Computer languages wrestle with commas too. The commas go between things in a list, so appending something onto the end of a list in many languages including JavaScript/JSON requires modifying the line before it, which people forget and which generates spurious diff output. Rust allows a trailing comma so every element of the list is identical, which is simultaneously confusing and great.

My super-English makes it more explicit with curly braces.

I love: { my parents, Lady Gaga, Michael Larabel, }.

maybe Neuralink will let us communicate in ASTs and Rusty Object Notation, or even CBOR.

[ssokolow]

Could be a branding problem. I think Oxford no longer has much cultural cred, outside of the elite circles already likely to employ your preferred punctuation convention. Maybe it needs some hot Tick Tock influencer to push it.

It's also called a serial comma or Harvard comma, so I think it's just that the Internet has exposed the slice of the population who were let down by their education systems.

My Zsh/Yakuake setup is very colorful so I see something like this and think "Cool, more programs will have neat things like syntax highlighting, colored links, animations, and more to help make the terminal's wall of text less like a wall and more informative." Yeah, crappy bling will creep in, but we have to take the good with the bad. That said, the day I hit F12 to drop down my terminal and instead of "skeevy420@domain" I get a picture of a house on a street corner, skeevy420 wrote on a mailbox, and the street signs above the stop sign are my distribution and domain names that view might very well change.

My big issue is that I still need to get around to patching/extending either my Thunderbird or my system font to force emojis to monochrome so idiots who think they know better than me don't MySpace up my inbox with their fake "IMPORTANT" markers and status flags in subject lines.

[coder]

My super-English makes it more explicit with curly braces.

I thought about matching list delimiters, but I wanted to minimize changes vs. existing syntax, as well as keep the syntax minimal. I figured the main benefit of start & end delimiters is for nested lists, which documents can already do with things like bullet-lists + additional indentation. In spoken English, it'd probably be confusing to have nested lists within a single sentence.