Right, but the whole point of language design is to be used by many people. I’ve programmed for 30 years and have never customized my keyboard setup. If you want to create a language for both of us, sticking with standard keyboard characters seems like the best choice.
Well, if my Julia code ever gets to the point where other people want to edit it, the community has embraced Unicode, so there won’t be a problem there. More generally, I’ll turn my comment into a question: how are people using computers without already having them set up to easily type these characters?
This thread is making the point that the issue isn’t the character set, but rather the keyboards. We’re probably locked in, there is so much inertia around the standard QWERTY with a few arrows and Esc. Maybe an integrated system builder with large scale like Apple could shift things slightly.
Indeed; Mac OS has supported easy entry of alternate (non-ASCII) characters on "self-inserting" keys with Option (which can be further modified with Shift) since the 80s. Granted it's a limited set, but they're useful. Here's a sampling “” … ™ Ω ç ß ∂ ∑ † π «» ¬ ˚ ∆ ƒ ∂
I normally use the Unicode keyboard so I can write out propositions, predicates, and set algebra. How many of us would readily adjust to the keyboarding required to break away from ASCII?
I can not effectively use my computer for anything without customizing the keyboard a little. I need to make the capslock key into an extra control key. I need to set up a compose key so I can type accents when writing in Spanish (even if I didn’t do that, what about writing people's names?). Even sticking with English, I need to type curly quotes and apostrophes, and em- and en- dashes, plus, now and then, symbols like ™ or ©. And I need to be able to type Greek letters when talking about physics or math. So, since my keyboard is already set up to handle all this, and it is easy to do so, for me it is delightful that I can use ω in my Julia code. The math looks more like math, equations take more familiar forms (which makes it easier to spot errors), and the code can be made more expressive. So, for me (but clearly not for everyone) this is not a “special” setup.