A lot of good stuff in there

Sounds like you've never worked designing a fail-safe system ...

Okay, when you're dealing with complex systems you can easily find yourself in a lose-lose situation, which is almost certainly the case here, but to say it's wtarreau's problem is just plain rubbish. "Which way is your brain wired?".

This must have been 80's, 90's, a magazine article. Where the writer was working on a gui program, and went to see - wonder of wonders - how the users were actually using it! And one user, demonstrating something, made a mistake and swore "I always get that wrong, what's wrong with me!"

But the lightbulb is that that bit was NOT CONSISTENT. Nine places in ten, what the user did was the RIGHT thing. That one place was badly designed, and here it was the WRONG thing to do. And this is why saying "syntax shouldn't be a problem" is bullshit. If your brain is programmed to think that you delimit strings with ", SQL is a damn nightmare! I'm seriously NOT used to using ' as a delimiter - I think FORTRAN used ", DataBASIC is happy with " (actually, it doesn't care, ", ', \, whatever ...) - being forced to use ' just grates on every level!

It's like forcing an emacs power user to use vi - NOTHING WORKS. And you can't (easily) reprogram them, because every where else is re-inforcing the emacs bindings, so vi is the odd one out, and it just grates - *all* the time.

There's quite a few places like this in programming languages. They have different heritages, they use the same syntax to mean different semantics, and are easy for people from the same heritage to learn while being a nightmare for others. And that's why I said it's a lose-lose situation. If 90% of your work is with C-style languages, every time you use a language with a different style you have to learn it from scratch. AGAIN. And AGAIN. Because your normal life is DE-programming all the new stuff you've learnt.

Cheers,
Wol