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

[Brandon Knope]

My point was not to argue for the removal of \. My point was that there is a measurable way to test the usability of such a key

Brandon

> On Jun 22, 2016, at 11:30 AM, Jeremy Pereira <jeremy.j.pereira at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> I find it somewhat disturbing that we are now trying to base language design around the layout of a US English keyboard.
> 
> “\” on my keyboard (British Macbook Pro Retina) is right next to the return key. It’s also much closer to the parentheses characters than $ is and (if you assume we are going to replace parentheses with braces as was suggested upthread) right next to the brace keys. 
> 
> Anyway, your heat map evidence actually negates the argument. If it was a frequently used key, it would have a hot spot of its own. It’s not (I tried it on some random samples of my own code), so that implies it is not a key that is used very often, which further implies it *should* be a little out of the way.
> 
> *The* escape character for strings is “\”. Please let’s not introduce a second one.
> 
> 
>> On 22 Jun 2016, at 00:08, Brandon Knope via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 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> 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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