Language is more like a virus than like a system. People will speak whatever language to which they are exposed. If it enables them to express most of the infor

Language is more like a virus than like a system. People will speak whatever language to which they are exposed. If it enables them to express most of the information they need to express, they will expose others to that language (reproduction) and tweak it on their own to be more expressive (mutation). This implies that it doesn't matter which language is "better" according to some technical or moral metric we might construct, it only matters which language can reproduce and mutate the fastest. To make an analogy that the Hacker News crowd will appreciate: English is the C to Esperanto's Scheme. C as initially conceived was just good enough to write Unix and thus reproduce itself further, mutating along the way until it was simultaneously everywhere and unrecognizable. Scheme is beautiful and powerful and yet still mostly confined to textbooks.