Software is stupid, programmers are overpaid poets.

[Jeroen3]

I disagree, control chars are a thing of the past, invisibles are a pain in the butt, human read-ability is very a good thing. JSON is what it is: *JavaScript* Object Notation, it suits JS perfectly, for any other languages YMMV.

Thing of the past is a bit bold. Shells still rely on them.
And they're nice when interfacing with a little embedded device over uart. It's lightweight and a human is still able to decode the datastream.

[paulca]

Answer, nobody.  So, why do we have to address computers in mangled grammar?

Because it is a prescriptive 100% definitive logical and mathematical communication where no ambiguities can be tolerated.   There is no "Oh I see what you mean there"

They didn't just pull this stuff out of their ass you know.

Take a look at COBOL.  (Excuse my bastaradization it's been decades since I used it)

DIVIDE 7 BY 3 GIVING REMAINDER X ANSWER Y

It's verbose, cumbersome and we are not writing programs for children (business users), we are writing code for people with a (hopefully) solid understanding of engineering, what is going on and computers and logic.

You don't see mathematicians writing out their equations like the COBOL syntax above either!

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

I disagree, control chars are a thing of the past, invisibles are a pain in the butt, human read-ability is very a good thing. JSON is what it is: *JavaScript* Object Notation, it suits JS perfectly, for any other languages YMMV.

Thing of the past is a bit bold. Shells still rely on them.
And they're nice when interfacing with a little embedded device over uart. It's lightweight and a human is still able to decode the datastream.

I think they're ok for binary formats, when the bytes are ~ the data rather than a representation of the data, e.g. a 0xff byte rather than a "255" string, but if you take the trouble to use a textual human readable representation of something why would you want to litter it with invisibles? The less invisible invisible is CR, and even that has problems: is it a CR? An LF? Both? If both, in which order? Grrr, no, please.

[bd139]

The answer is that a line ending is \n. Everyone else is wrong 

[lundmar]

Having reviewed this thread I think it is safe to conclude that programmers are indeed poets 

[Kjelt]

Naaah in the end we conclude that programmers are extremely smart engineers that despite many difficult and almost impossible obstacles,
still are able to get things to work 

[Kjelt]

The biggest problem for SW engineers is what's between the chair and the keyboard.
A user can think of so many illogical input that it is impossible to prevent everything.

If a HW engineer would face the same problem than it would have the enduser to allow to choose and use its own power supply,
so the device you have to build has to withstand every possible powersupply with every possible connection ever made from 1,5VDC to 2kV AC

And to proof this I have a real life situation from a friend that bought an american apparatus on amazon, it was delivered at his home with a 120V mains connector so it would not fit.
The supply was 5V 2A polarized and he did not have this so he used another adapter he had lying around, his argument: the connector fitted.
This was unfortunately an 14VAC adapter and the magic smoke escaped.
Now who is at fault here?

If this was software that failed on some stupid input everyone would point to the software engineer, now it is hardware and everyone points to the user.
But was it so much extra effort to add one crowbar or one diode and fuse?
Or why do we not design a special unique connector for each and every possible voltage and polarity, so grandparents and technical deficient persons can not make any mistakes ?

[JPortici]

Perhaps we should introduce font sensitivity into programming, where the Courier word has a different meaning from the Arial version. 

brillant  use italic to comment something, underline for time-critical stuff. This is truly the language of the future

[dmills]

Oh Ghod, reminds me of something seen at university, a guy had seen the rest of us using some random syntax highlighting editor but did not really get it.

He was seen to be writing a program in MS WORD, highlighting keywords in colour by hand!
He did not last long on the course.

Regards, Dan.

[Maxlor]

also, who starts a sentence with a lowercase letter because the word can only be written that way, or walks into an office and announces. "CAPITALGEE-ood morning, CAPITALEMM-argaret!"

Answer, nobody.  So, why do we have to address computers in mangled grammar?

Because you want computers to do what you say, exactly, 100% of the time. Human communication doesn't require strict grammar, because it's usually perfectly ok to go "What did you just say?" and ask for clarification. If computers did that 1000 times a second, just because the programmer used ambiguous wording, well, it wouldn't be an improvement.

[bd139]

He was seen to be writing a program in MS WORD, highlighting keywords in colour by hand!
He did not last long on the course.

That's not as crazy as it sounds. I designed a product that uses word and control controls as in input format for tooling. This made me half my mortgage 

[paulca]

Font face, style, size etc. IS used in software to denote certain different things.  But only in UML diagrams and spec docs.