Your justification for a single syntax is "I don't want to have to look at python and have to parse spaces, curly braces, square braces, etc." But the comment you just replied to said:
>Maybe we'd have editors and viewers where you could configure the syntax however you wanted
I took this to mean that, in this fantasy universe, you could make any source file look however you want. Like tabs vs spaces and pure html vs html-with-css, this is about separating meaning from presentation. Is there a good reason to force the same visual representation on everyone?
> Is there a good reason to force the same visual representation on everyone?
Leaky abstractions. If there are two different visual representations then sometimes someone using one representation will need to think about the other.
I think this is the best case against a more abstract notion of source code. I don't think you'll ever achieve the dream of heterogeneous representations on a single team unless you somehow get an autoformatter like black to work with both.
* Would such bytecode/binary be considered "source code"? If no, then bye bye Open Source Definition (OSD). Distributing such thing would not be considered open source.
* If it is considered "source code", then is it considered "obfuscated" source code? If yes, then bye bye OSD. Distributing such thing would not be considered open source.
* If it is not considered "obfuscated" source code, then what's the difference compared to, say, JVM bytecode? Is it only that an IDE exists that can modify such bytecode in a fancy way?
* In that case, if such an IDE is created that modifies JVM bytecode directly, and a program is created using that IDE modifying the JVM bytecode[1] directly, and such "source code" is distributed, the would that bytecode be open source? Since, after all, it's "the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program" (and therefore not obfuscated).
[1]: Or maybe some superset that is mostly JVM bytecode but it has some opcodes for higher level niceties.
You are right. It would be cool if that was an option, but it just seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity to actually make that happen. In addition if you ever want to look at code with a colleague on the same computer then the syntax becomes an issue again.
>Maybe we'd have editors and viewers where you could configure the syntax however you wanted
I took this to mean that, in this fantasy universe, you could make any source file look however you want. Like tabs vs spaces and pure html vs html-with-css, this is about separating meaning from presentation. Is there a good reason to force the same visual representation on everyone?