Language change and code breaks

[James Logajan]

Bjorn Pettersen wrote:
> 
> > From: Guido van Rossum [mailto:guido at digicool.com]
> >
> > > I'm still wondering what advantage there is to crippling the
> > > expressivity of a language for the sake of a small group of
> > > non-programmers.
> >
> > IMO there are two non-truths in this statement.
> >
> > (1) The expressivity of the language is not crippled.
> >
> > (2) Potentially, the group of non-programmers is much larger than the
> >     group of programmers (and it's easier to teach programmers an
> >     arbitrary rule than non-programmers).
> 
> TRuE, tHe ExPRESsiVity oF ThE lANGuaGE is ProBAbLY nOt cRipPled,
> hOWEvEr, tHere ARe SigNIficantLy FeweR ideNtIFIeRs AVaILABlE whICh mEAns
> iT is LESs eXPRessIvE. IN pArTicULar, cOMmON Idioms liKE naMiNg CLASseS
> stArTiNg WiTh UppER cASE lETtERS, AND instaNCeS OF THose cLAsSes
> begINNiNG with A lOwER caSE LettER CaN NO LongeR Be usED.
> 
> AS fAR aS thE Size Of thE VARious camPs, I haVE YeT tO sEe a coMPeLLinG
> aRGuMeNt thAT THE grOup of noN-pRoGRaMmeRS THat WILl taKe up
> pRoGRAmmInG, ANd wiLL DO sO in PYTHon InsTEad oF VisUal BasiC, Is any
> LARGeR Than The groUp of ProgRAmmERs.

I'M TELLING THERE IS NO SEMANTIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UPPER AND LOWER CASE!
anything you see that may suggest otherwise is merely a figment of your
imagination. it has been proven with case studies and geometric logic that
there were strawberries, er, i mean indications that understanding mutable
versus immutable, class versus instance variables, slice assignment,
threading, slicing, and dicing were child's play for new programmers
compared to the agonizing difficulty of remembering that on line 3 they used
mySum and on line 6 they used mysum (but on line 9 they used
my_sum...nevermind!)

it has also been shown that the words "their", "there", and "they're" (among
many homonyms) are easily confused even in written form and theirfore the
english language should be changed to accommodate people knew to the english
language. yeah, write.

Note to the humor impaired: :-)