> Decide whether a language is for humans or for machines and do one of those things. And do the one thing well instead of both, but badly. The thing is all th

> Decide whether a language is for humans or for machines and do one of those things. And do the one thing well instead of both, but badly. The thing is all these languages (ASM, C, XML, JSON, Python, etc) are fundamentally about communication between a human and a machine. We make tradeoffs between making them easy to parse (for the machine) or easy to read and write (for the human) but they all must address both needs. And when you have a problem domain as large as "2D Vector Graphics" or worse, "The Web", complexity is unavoidable. I'm not saying we can't do better than SVG. I agree with many of the author's points and would love to see a minimal subset of SVG that is easy to write by hand. The tradeoffs are engineering decisions and important. But don't pretend that you can pick a goal such as, "easy for humans" and ignore all the other dimensions of the language design problem.