The basic conundrum, as I was just explaining to a friend, is that as you drop syntax and validation, you gain more possible expressible meanings. A machine cod

The basic conundrum, as I was just explaining to a friend, is that as you drop syntax and validation, you gain more possible expressible meanings. A machine code instruction stream, concatenative syntax, and S-expressions all sit in very similar territory in that they are very close to a computed result, and in many cases will accept fairly arbitrary combinations of symbols. Concatenative is in one sweet spot since it deals well with compositions of partial expressions that have no particular "address", while s-exps are in another, where the meanings are bundled into fully addressable trees. Both Forth and Lisp make use of quoting to turn data into code and vice-versa, and introduce ways to assign persistent names and therefore reduce local context and allow reusage; their main difference is in whether they primarily serialize a figurative representation of data structure, or the step-by-step sequence of computing the structure. And whichever you choose, that's great(I've gone on a huge concatenative binge myself), but then to define the application's final protocol, you have to filter it. You have to filter to turn many of these meanings into errors, which leads towards syntax, type-checking, and all the rest. And to the extent that this is a problem, it mostly reflects the human and philosophical factors. What we believe in determines what meanings we wish to see represented in the protocol; our beliefs are many, varied and often contradictory, with entire organizations and systems of governance designed around reconciliation of these beliefs; therefore extensively structured protocols are necessary to define the "sometimes-errors" that result from our incoherence, our limited notion of reality. And that is producing the gradual ramp up towards complex languages, formats and protocols that address the impossible with the incomprehensible. But data and protocols that are very truthful usually do not require such a complex structure, or that structure emerges from natural laws. They may be hard to compute, or hard to store - DNA sequences are very large, and modern cryptography is premised on computational difficulty - but the code that deals with these things is not large in expression, and only needs validation along some very particular axes. Regardless the task of discovering and implementing these things is hard, because evaluating the theory is hard, much harder than validating whether a stream of bytes represents a number, a string, or a list.