[swift-evolution] Thoughts on replacing \() with $() or some other symbol

[Brandon Knope]

Actually… we can go pretty scientific on this sort of thing and heat map keyboard usage to get a better picture of how “usable” this is.

I pasted a file that contains seven \’s in it and heat mapped it at https://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/

Even *with* several \’s throughout my source file the majority of my key presses take place much closer to the $ key than the \ key.

I think we can all argue about what is clearer or not, but I think for the majority of us, the \ key is quite inconvenient compared to the keys around where we type the most.

I also ran several of iOS 10’s sample code through the heat map and continue to get pretty similar results: the \ is much further from the hottest part of the keyboard than the ones closer to where your hand usually rests.

Maybe this is flawed, but I think it is hard to argue that the \ is easy to type when there are far more usable alternatives.

Brandon



> On Jun 21, 2016, at 6:10 PM, Daniel Resnick via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I also disagree for the same reasons that Gwynne and Brent mentioned: I find '\(...)' easy to read, fine to type, and consistent with other string escaping syntax.
> 
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 3:55 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
> > I find that typing \(var) is very disruptive to my typing flow. The more I code in Swift, the more I like it, but every time I'm coding and then have to hiccup while typing \ then ( causes me to be annoyed. I know, it's minor, but it isn't a key combination that flows quickly.
> >
> > I would much rather have $() or perhaps ${} (like Groovy lang) or perhaps @() to go along with other uses of @ throughout the language.
> 
> Even though I'm used to Perl's and Ruby's interpolation syntaxes, I immediately liked `\(…)`. It's parsimonious: Rather than taking a third character (besides \ and ") to mean something special in a string literal, it reuses one of the existing ones. There's no need to escape a character you wouldn't otherwise have to touch, or to think of another character as "magical" in a string. It fits nicely with the rest of the syntax, with `\` indicating a special construct and then `()` delimiting an expression, just as they do elsewhere in the language. It's an elegant solution to a problem traditionally solved inelegantly. It's very Swifty in that way.
> 
> > A shifted key, like $ or @, followed by another shifted key like (, allows for a much faster flow and they are much closer to the home keys than \ which is nearly as far from home keys as possible (and awkward).
> 
> 
> I don't have any trouble typing it personally. If you find yourself accidentally typing `\9` or `|(`, we could probably offer an error for the former or warning for the latter with a fix-it. But if you're complaining that it takes a tiny fraction of a second longer to type than `$(` would, then honestly, I just can't bring myself to care. Swift optimizes for code reading. If we wanted to optimize for code typing instead, we'd have a very different style.
> 
> --
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
> 
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