2020-07-14

Smileys are ubiquitous on the internet today. They are, however, unefficient.
Take, for example, the two smilies often used to express happiness:
:) and :D

The first is used for general happiness, the other for extraordinary happiness.
This is, in my opinion, way too limiting. It's also too difficult to type. Reaching
that far across your keyboard to type first a colon, then a parenthesis or other
symbol, is way too complex for a simple chat message in certain situations, like
online games where you can't pause for messaging for too long.

So, what's the solution? I introduce you to... Russian smiley notation!
It works like this: Instead of mimicking a face with eyes and optional nose, it's
just the mouth. A simple smiley-face is written like this:
)

Stronger opinions are expressed by adding more parentheses. A very big smile:
))))))))))))

Now, this looks like lisp code, but it's very expressive, and that's why I like
it. There's no real reason to use a colon, we recognize it as a smiley without it.

And that is why I like the Russian notation method. It's basically an optimization
and improvement over the more common method.

built with sh(1) and cat(1)