Joshua Ballanco <jballanc / gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Joey Zhou <yimutang / gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 1. It makes people happy, writing less code, and no harm to readability.
> 
> Personally, I would like to hear more on how having another operator for new
> Rubyists to learn does not harm readability? One of the oft-cited advantages
> of Ruby vs Perl is that Perl so often devolves into characters
> indistinguishable from line-noise.

Completely agreed.  A smaller syntax and fewer operators improves
readability and learnability in my experience[1].  I think
pronounce-ability is a good factor to readability, too.

Code is written once and read many times (often by people who are not
the author), so optimize for readability.

[1] - I've done a fair bit of Perl, but also languages with small
      syntaxes like AWK and C.