There are a lot of counter examples to this claim but just to keep this short, I'll go along with your claim.
A downside of this is heavy overload of keywords/symbols. For example, last time I checked, the underscore (_) has six different meanings depending on where it's used.
The number of syntactic rules is not a good way to judge whether a language is difficult to read, otherwise, Brainfuck would be the most readable language on the planet.
> the underscore (_) has six different meanings depending on where it's used.
no it has not ,it always express some kind of default behavior. just like ! in ruby method means mutation or ? means it returns a boolean.
> The number of syntactic rules is not a good way to judge whether a language is difficult to read, otherwise, Brainfuck would be the most readable language on the planet.
! in ruby means "dangerous", which is actually poorly defined. In some major libraries it is used to mean exception raising, in some it means self-mutation.
The bang (!) does not mean "destructive" nor lack of it mean non
destructive either. The bang sign means "the bang version is more
dangerous than its non bang counterpart; handle with care". Since
Ruby has a lot of "destructive" methods, if bang signs follow your
opinion, every Ruby program would be full of bangs, thus ugly.
There are a lot of counter examples to this claim but just to keep this short, I'll go along with your claim.
A downside of this is heavy overload of keywords/symbols. For example, last time I checked, the underscore (_) has six different meanings depending on where it's used.
The number of syntactic rules is not a good way to judge whether a language is difficult to read, otherwise, Brainfuck would be the most readable language on the planet.