The "visual noise" makes it clearer the me that it surrounds a block of text, so I don't buy this.

Double quotes are also the convention in english to delineate a literal, so I would argue it's more obvious.

I'll grant you keyboard presses though. There's an obvious advantage to single quotes here, but consider why this is the case. To make the use of "apostrophe" more efficient since it appears far more often than a double quote in english. I suppose it's pragmatic to leverage this advantage in code where string quoting is extremely common...

Perhaps double quoting is a bias I've developed writing code, but I suspect it's actually a bias I carried over from reading and writing english and what simply seemed more obvious.

Language design than supports both makes me crazy. Pick one and enforce it!

You can still type single quotes. You have a tool to convert that for you.

The visual noise complaint is interesting. Do you also consider the letter W to be more noisy than the letter V? Should we discourage the use of noisy letters in the alphabet?

A double-quote is more noisy than a single-quote, and W is more noisy than V.

The difference is that " and ' are equally usable options in the context we're talking about. Quotes are very common, so the visual noise adds up when your screen is full of quote marks. Given that they mean the same thing, and one is both harder to type and harder to read, it makes sense to prefer the other.

> Given that they mean the same thing, and one is both harder to type and harder to read, it makes sense to prefer the other.

Nailed it.

A double quote is in no way harder to read. Only on Hacker News.

this seems a bit reductive.

Yes, why www. was dropped, and quotes are used everywhere in most Python code. The triple doubles for doc strings are the worst example, though I have no illusions pep8 will be changed any time soon.

> The visual noise complaint is interesting.

I thought the same. I guess you could just modify your programming font to make the double quotes really tiny :)

I agree about the noise, but, it's much easier to work with. raise FooException("Can't load bar") works, as does f"The flange is elevated by {flange['spronge']} degrees of spronge."

Goes both ways, sometimes there's text to quote:

raise KeyError('"%s" not found.' % name)

f'The flange is elevated by {flange["spronge"]} degrees of spronge.'

I don't normally use many contractions or possessives in my code, but am willing to admit it happens occasionally.

Yep, that's why I like how repr() does it. Guido solved this nicely a long time ago :)

Eh, many programming languages use double quotes for strings, and single quotes for singular characters. Languages that can use single quotes for strings that I know of are ruby and python.

Don’t forget VimL, the language that insanely decided to use double quotes as a “start of comment” indicator, then went back and gave them special meaning based on their position so they either signal the start of a comment or a string.

A different comment character could have been chosen, but this affects nothing. It's not insane.

Lua, and there are others. I favor double quotes for this same reason even when single quotes are allowed.

I'd like «guillemets» but that's going to have to be self-serve...

I use single quotes when the string in question is used like an enumeration:

    set_color('black','white')

And double quotes for strings meant to be read by a human:

    print("Hello there.  How are you?")

And an example with both forms:

    syslog('warning',"unit %s spin rate %f too low",u,rate)

For me, it's an indication of how I expect the string to be used.

And even then, Perl and Ruby (heck, even Bash) have a semantic difference between double- and single-quoted strings. The only other popular general-purpose languages where they're synonymous are PHP, JavaScript, and Lua.

>The only other popular general-purpose languages where they're synonymous are PHP, JavaScript, and Lua.

PHP does treat single and double quotes differently. Contents of single quotes strings are not parsed for variable substitution.

Also Pascal and SQL.

And JavaScript!