Syntactic Sugar

Peter Landin coined the term syntactic sugar in 1964, in the paper, “The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions.”1 In the world of programming languages, a[i] is sugar for *(a + i). A for loop is sugar over a jump and a counter. A class in JavaScript is sugar over prototypes. async and await are sugar over a state machine someone used to write by hand. In every case a compiler will show you the expansion which we do not have to look into. It makes life easier for all of us. We’re now in world where AI commoditizes knowledge, nearly everything above the machine has turned into syntactic sugar, and we are left with having to get down to first principles. However, we need to be careful with it, because “just sugar” is the same dismissal people aim at design when they mean decoration. Syntax is a user interface for thought. Ken Iverson built a Turing Award lecture around that in 1979, calling notation a tool of thought. Sugar is the part made for humans. English is, perhaps, now the top…