> People who are fluent in reading languages written with alphabet systems don't read letter-by-letter, but instead read word-by-word, using effortless word recognition.
It all adds up. Languages like COBOL, PASCAL or ADA (originally designed for terminals with very limited character sets, sometimes even lacking lowercase text - thus requiring case-insensitive syntax) make it a lot harder to survey larger code blocks.
If that's true, I would expect logographic writing systems to cause less reader fatigue than alphabetic writing system. But as far as I'm aware that isn't the case, and the two are roughly equivalent.
Considering what XQuery does the syntax does a great job of being readable. Every time I look at React components using JSX I'm unfavourably comparing it to XQuery.
It all adds up. Languages like COBOL, PASCAL or ADA (originally designed for terminals with very limited character sets, sometimes even lacking lowercase text - thus requiring case-insensitive syntax) make it a lot harder to survey larger code blocks.