All natural languages have a little bit of redundancy. It helps solve ambiguities more easily, especially when solving it in a strictly minimal grammar would require re-parsing the entire text from start. Having both opening and closing parens / brackets / braces is a good example.
Redundancy also helps when transmission is imperfect. And you do have imperfect transmission when writing code (typos), and even when reading (skimming text, missing a character).
CoffeScript makes every character count, especially punctuation. It's really, really easy to make a small typo in these. But CoffeeScript eschews redundancy, so the typo becomes another valid grammatical construction, with an entirely different meaning. At best, you get a cryptic translation error elsewhere. At worst, it gets accepted but works differently than you had intended.
APL has this property, too. But an APL program is very terse, you pay attention to every character in a short string of them. It does not feel like Javascript which is traditionally lax in the punctuation and whitespace department, catching you off guard.
CoffeeScript was an interesting experiment, but I'd say its result is negative.
I agree. The Rust foundation (or Mozilla's Rust Team in the early stages) tried out a sigil heavy approach in the beginning, but they ultimately made the decision to steer Rust away from being overloaded with single character keywords of differing significance.
Sadly, with Steve Klabnik's withdrawal from the core Team, the current maintainers are on a path to repeat these mistakes.
Redundancy also helps when transmission is imperfect. And you do have imperfect transmission when writing code (typos), and even when reading (skimming text, missing a character).
CoffeScript makes every character count, especially punctuation. It's really, really easy to make a small typo in these. But CoffeeScript eschews redundancy, so the typo becomes another valid grammatical construction, with an entirely different meaning. At best, you get a cryptic translation error elsewhere. At worst, it gets accepted but works differently than you had intended.
APL has this property, too. But an APL program is very terse, you pay attention to every character in a short string of them. It does not feel like Javascript which is traditionally lax in the punctuation and whitespace department, catching you off guard.
CoffeeScript was an interesting experiment, but I'd say its result is negative.