Come on, that's a complete bikeshed and I'm sure you know it. If you have to read code aloud you can just say "fun" or "function" and "mod" or "module", obviously. And since those symbols are used everywhere in the source code I really doubt anybody is going to forget what they mean.
I know it's trendy to remove all non alnum characters and make everything super verbose but there's a compromise to make here. Because some languages went overboard with symbol soup doesn't mean all symbols/abbreviations are bad.
This is the kind of reacting any newcomer to a language makes. You start with lisp? "omg all those parens!" You start with python? "omg significant whitespace!" You start with C? "OMG all those semicolon at the end of lines!" You start with perl? "OMG!" You start with APL? "O|▼".
Also I think making basic language constructs overly verbose doesn't help legibility because it drowns the actually interesting bits in a lot of boilerplate. VHDL comes to mind, but it's probably not what you were talking about...
I know it's trendy to remove all non alnum characters and make everything super verbose but there's a compromise to make here. Because some languages went overboard with symbol soup doesn't mean all symbols/abbreviations are bad.
This is the kind of reacting any newcomer to a language makes. You start with lisp? "omg all those parens!" You start with python? "omg significant whitespace!" You start with C? "OMG all those semicolon at the end of lines!" You start with perl? "OMG!" You start with APL? "O|▼".
Also I think making basic language constructs overly verbose doesn't help legibility because it drowns the actually interesting bits in a lot of boilerplate. VHDL comes to mind, but it's probably not what you were talking about...