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Of course, the sentiment in this reply could probably have been expressed with far less text and/or syntax (probably in less than a tweet even). IMO people pre
by stormbrew 11y ago
Of course, the sentiment in this reply could probably have been expressed with far less text and/or syntax (probably in less than a tweet even).
IMO people prefer to communicate with some nuance and some degree of redundant expression. Terseness is itself even a kind of nuance when you're allowed to not use it.
Drives for widespread purity in language never seem to pan out, in either human<->human communication or human<->computer communication. I suspect there are reasons for this that might be somewhat under-researched.
- yjgyhj 11y agoYour opinion is just as valid. Can't say syntax is _simpler_ than s-expressions though. But so is ASM.
- dang 11y agoWell, let me see. Conversation isn't code, natural language isn't programming language, I don't think I care about "purity in language", and I'm pretty sure I can make a case for everything in my comment needing to be there. I do agree that people often desire to make things more complicated than they need to.
- stormbrew 11y agoExplain in more detail why code isn't conversation? You are communicating a set of expectations about what a computer should do to both the computer and other humans who either read it or interact with it.
- dang 11y agoWhat I said is that conversation isn't code. Not a commutative statement! That is, you seemed to be arguing that there was redundancy in my comment, similar to what I called busywork and noise in code. An interesting point, but my comment was conversation—not code—so it struck me as a non sequitur. Your comment hints at an insight into why we make code overcomplicated. But the superfluous complexity I'm talking about rarely strikes me as nuance, i.e. valuable enhancement for humans. It's mostly boilerplate to satisfy machines. It's no accident that "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" is a line that came out of the Lisp mentality.
- yjgyhj 11y agoLook then at human languages - two of the giants are English and Spanish. Both pretty simple. Definitely they both are the most spoken as second language. They would not have that position if it was not for their simplicity, compared to other languages. Mandarin is an outlier in that comparison - but also not popular as a second language.
- mkehrt 11y agoEnglish and Spanish hold their positions as popular languages based on the fact they were both spoken in world spanning empires in the past, not because they are particularly simple. English, in particular, is known for being difficult to learn--it uses phones that very rare ("th" and the English "r"), it has a bizarrely large vocabulary, and, somewhat separately, its spelling is nonsensical.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- JBReefer 11y agoYour are correct about the cause of dominance, but Spanish is absolutely the most simple language in large use.