The question is whether we can say anything relevant at all by means of self observation. It's very hard to do anything more than just observing existing habits. Even the idea that fewer tokens are better breaks down sometimes. Just look at Perl or complex regular expressions.
It seems to me that what counts is not necessarily tokens of the programming language but rather "tokens" of the mental model into which a syntactical expression is translated. But what are the fundamental characteristics of those mental tokens and are they distinct tokens in the first place? We probably need to look to cognitive sciences to find out more about that.
What is pretty clear to me (admittedly through self observation) is that the brain likes to take shortcuts based on the context we preceive ourselves to be in. We see things in one context that we don't see in others even though they are there. So, basically, we form context specific mental models that filter the world and create a vocabulary of shortcuts that work efficiently in that particular context. Syntax can be a visual cue to invoke that context switching facility of the brain, for better or worse.
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The question is whether we can say anything relevant at all by means of self observation. It's very hard to do anything more than just observing existing habits. Even the idea that fewer tokens are better breaks down sometimes. Just look at Perl or complex regular expressions.
It seems to me that what counts is not necessarily tokens of the programming language but rather "tokens" of the mental model into which a syntactical expression is translated. But what are the fundamental characteristics of those mental tokens and are they distinct tokens in the first place? We probably need to look to cognitive sciences to find out more about that.
What is pretty clear to me (admittedly through self observation) is that the brain likes to take shortcuts based on the context we preceive ourselves to be in. We see things in one context that we don't see in others even though they are there. So, basically, we form context specific mental models that filter the world and create a vocabulary of shortcuts that work efficiently in that particular context. Syntax can be a visual cue to invoke that context switching facility of the brain, for better or worse.