How to beat Wadler's law?

Question

I was looking forward to the PLDI StackExchange site, but am dismayed to seee that it has fallen victim to Wadler's law:

In any language design, the total time spent discussing
a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to
the power of its position.
           0. Semantics
           1. Syntax
           2. Lexical syntax
           3. Lexical syntax of comments

Indeed, here are the current top questions:

1. What are some syntax options for generators?
2. Why do most languages prefer complex enum instead of simple enum?
3. What are common options for lambda function syntax?
4. What are some options for syntax for async/await?
5. What are the pros and cons of dynamic scoping?
6. What are the syntax options for implementing a ternary "if" operator?

The site should have been called "the concrete syntax of programming languages". I do hope this is just an initial phase, but perhaps there is something we can do to promote the kind of thinking and understanding of programming language design that's actually found at PL conferences and papers. That would presumably do more good to the wider audience than strict adherence to Wadler's law. Or should we just wait until all questions regarding the lexical structure of syntax have been exhausted?

Answer 1

I've waited a while for someone more eloquent than me to speak up but as they haven't you are stuck with me for now.

I have two answers to this one:

• Don't worry about it
• Ask Better Questions

Don't worry about it

The syntax of a programming language is its user interface. Some people rightly concern themselves with the surface syntax as programming is fundamentally (from their point of view) a HCI issue.

Lots of questions about syntax does not mean these are the only types of question that will exist here. There is no upper limit to the total number of questions.

We haven't devolved to the level of bikeshedding the one true syntax of comments.

Ask Better Questions

Rather than Wadler's law we should perhaps worry more about the similar Law of triviality.

The risk is the community becoming populated by people concerned with trivial issues like syntax and scaring off important contributions from the more advanced engineering & academic communities.

The way to beat that is to ask enough good questions to keep those people interested in engaging.

Most communities like this will have a range of people with different levels of experience and backgrounds. As long as the mix does not tilt too far one way or the other this one will do fine. I think we have a good mix here currently. I would be sad to lose either half of the community even if that means having to suffer the occasional dumb question about the lexical syntax of comments.

Answer 2

I have also seen "Wadler's law" brought up in the r/ProgrammingLanguages Discord server, and in the #lang-dev channel on the official Rust Discord server, in reference to this Stack Exchange site. So clearly there is a perception that too many questions here are about syntax.

But I can't say I have noticed this as a problem so far. You have pointed at the top 6 questions (why 6?) and four of these are about syntax, while one is about data types and another is about name resolution. But Wadler's law, as stated by the OP, is not about popularity but about quantity, so the fact that the top questions are disproportionately about syntax doesn't tell us about the proportion of questions on the entire site.

At the moment I write this answer, there are 150 questions on the main site, 46 of which contain the word "syntax". Of course, not all questions about syntax will contain the exact word "syntax", and a few questions will contain the word "syntax" despite not really being about syntax (e.g. questions about transforming abstract syntax trees).

But 150 questions is few enough for me to go through all of them to make sure that the tag syntax was applied to all questions where I think it's appropriate; so I did that. There were several questions missing the tag (so I added it) and one or two where I think the tag was misused (so I removed it). I may have missed a couple due to the pagination order changing as I went through, but afterwards there are now 40 questions with the tag. (There were about 35 when I started).

This means approximately 27% of questions on the site are currently about syntax. I also suspect this will tend to go down over time, since it's early days for the site, and syntax questions are the ones that are easier to ask and also the ones most likely to be closed as duplicates in the future once there is an established base of canonical dupe-targets. Even so, 27% is not really that concerning to me.

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Update (15th June 2023): I've periodically gone through the list of all questions sorted by date, to make sure that the syntax tag is used where appropriate (in my own judgement). Currently, 66 out of 312 questions are about syntax. That's 21%, so the proportion has indeed fallen, and I suspect it will continue to fall.