[swift-evolution] [Review] SE-0144: Allow Single Dollar Sign as a Valid Identifier

[Goffredo Marocchi]

Sent from my iPhone

> On 20 Oct 2016, at 07:54, Russ Bishop via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
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> 
>> On Oct 17, 2016, at 11:45 PM, Rien via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> “culturally offensive” is not a logical argument.
>> A programming language should be logically consistent no matter how many cultures are offended by it.
>> If Swift is driven by SJW’s then very quickly it will cease to be an effective language.
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> 
> I don’t think using “SJW” as a slur is appropriate, certainly not in swift-evolution. We aim to be an open and inclusive community. Cultural sensitivity is one of Swift’s goals; that’s why it supports Unicode identifiers… so people can use their native language if they wish. The world is not the Western Latin-1 character set.

True, but sometimes restricting yourself can bring better results. A big reason why technical and scientific progress is advancing so fast in the modern era is also attributed to people being able to rely on a common lingua franca (English today, something else in 100 years perhaps?) and very fast communication amongst people of different cultural backgrounds happening at lighting speed.

People on teams resist to code guidelines for freedom of expression reasons too, but the values of standardisation are greater than what we achieve by prioritising creative expression in the form of writing all my code in kanji or using proper Italian accented characters or following my own code formatting convention... pride and fear often put people off when self imposing limitations for the greater good. English as programming lingua franca brings people together more than it suppresses valuable creative thought. 

English is obviously not my first language, but I enjoy the fact that having the documentation, developer forums, this kind of mailing lists, etc... all standardising around English as technical lingua franca is both useful, facilitate communication, and is totally not unprecedented (Latin used to be the defacto lingua franca for medicine, biology, botany, and all sorts of scientific and philosophical discussion... it did not kill the local languages and brought people together).


> None of these goals are mutually-exclusive with logical arguments; that’s a false dichotomy. 
> 
> I’m not aware of any programming language that is 100% logically consistent. They all make concessions to programmer culture, history, practical concerns, and even opinion/whims. Python doesn’t have multi-line lambdas because Guido doesn’t like them. Even Haskell has unsafePerformIO because the real world is not a pure function. We talk about how beautiful or ugly syntax is all the time, which is absolutely a value judgement.
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> 
> 
> Russ
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