Why syntax is becoming less painful

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/why_syntax_is_becoming_less_painful.htm]

Unless you're a language enthusiast, most developers dislike "wasting" time trying to understand syntax. Syntax trivia makes for bad interviews, developers dismiss a problem as "that's just syntax", and it's generally considered a waste of mental energy for developers to thrash over syntax.

 

Now, at least for the type of .Net application development that I often do, syntax is mostly pain-free, partly thanks to:

• Powerful IDEs that include intellisense and compiler checking.

• Billions of online examples that are a google-query away, such as complete reference guides, tutorials, forums, and fellow blogger's who encountered the exact same one-in-a-million bug.

• Better designed APIs. for example, both C# and VB.Net reuse the entire .Net framework, making syntax differences trivial.

• Emergence of standards, like XML, HTML, and language conventions.

• The deliberate attempt by designers and architects to reduce the need for syntax by wrapping interfaces with abstraction, using standards and patterns and reusable blocks, and leveraging config files.

• More developers in the field with whom you can ask syntax questions too. For example, I can often ask clear-cut SQL syntax questions to our DBA, and he'll just nail them. ("What's the syntax for setting an index on a temp table...?")

• More powerful hardware that lets you do all this. If you only have 4KB of memory, it's a challenge just to make something possible, and you're willing to throw easy-syntax overboard to get it to work. Your machine lacks the resources to "afford" an IDE, and every language construct is optimized for the limited resources as opposed to ease-of-learning.

However, it wasn't always this way. I remember as a kid back in the late 80's, with the TRS80 and RSDOS, just staring blankly at the green and black television (didn't have a monitor). There were a few "computer people" I could talk too (like my brothers), but it was nothing like today.

 

This comes to mind because I've been reading up on PowerShell and Silverlight, and it just works. I haven't had a major syntax problem yet. It feels like I'm just cruising down the highway, and that's a nice feeling.