The idea that human and machine language parsing have any underlying similarity is amusing but pretty absurd. It depends upon the idea that we're somehow doing

The idea that human and machine language parsing have any underlying similarity is amusing but pretty absurd. It depends upon the idea that we're somehow doing the "same essential thing", which we are not. Humans do not translate text to serial machine instructions for a processor. They do many things with text, but that is (very seldom) one of them. I meant literally that Ruby is easier for a human to read for comprehension than say, x86 assembly, which it is. Ruby requires (however) substantially more complex parsing logic to machine parse (translate to machine instructions), because Ruby syntax tolerates an almost absurd amount of ambiguity. This distinction holds when you compare Ruby to many common programming languages. Lisp is an excellent example of a high-level language that can be parsed with minimal complexity. I can teach an undergraduate to build a Lisp parser in a day, but it would take weeks to get someone up to speed on a Ruby parser. This was not posited as an essential tradeoff in programming languages (if I came off that way, my apologies). Ease of human readability is probably orthogonal to ease of machine parsing.