4 ms·

> The fewer ways to express something, the better. Your last sentence could be rewritten "It is better to express things in as few ways as possible", or "Havin

by vorg 15y ago

> The fewer ways to express something, the better. Your last sentence could be rewritten "It is better to express things in as few ways as possible", or "Having fewer ways to express something is better". English, however, allows you to omit the main verb for the causation in a parallel construction, you were able to write it shorter, and with a 3-syllable climax after a pause at the end for effect. Shouldn't programming languages also provide many different ways to express things?

william42 15y ago
No, because that makes it harder to understand what it's doing. Remember that programming languages are not learned at a very young age and continuously trained for decades the way natural languages are.
- vorg 15y ago
  The era of programming languages is only beginning, and perhaps within a generation or two programming languages will be learnt at a young age and continuously trained for decades. Perhaps there'll only be a small number of languages that people learn, so people will have a "native" programming language in the way people have a native natural language.
- chromatic 15y ago
  No, because that makes it harder to understand what it's doing. Without looking at an example of working code, how is it possible to say that one particular phrasing is so obviously better than any other that it and it alone should be allowed to exist? I appreciate in Perl very much the postfix conditional expression syntax because it exploits the end weight linguistic property and allows me to emphasize the most important part of the statement when the situation warrants. I believe that makes my code clearer because it looks different from the Algol-standard conditional syntax.
  - vorg 15y ago
    > Perl ... allows me to emphasize the most important part of the statement when the situation warrants. Yes. The ordering of elements in a sentence is its "thematic" structure, just as important in communicating as the "transitive" structure of sentences, i.e the relationship between nouns, verbs, etc. Most programming languages copy the transitive structure of natural languages, but not many allow the programmer to freely choose the thematic structure.

by vorg 15y ago

william42 15y ago

No, because that makes it harder to understand what it's doing. Remember that programming languages are not learned at a very young age and continuously trained for decades the way natural languages are.

vorg 15y ago
The era of programming languages is only beginning, and perhaps within a generation or two programming languages will be learnt at a young age and continuously trained for decades. Perhaps there'll only be a small number of languages that people learn, so people will have a "native" programming language in the way people have a native natural language.
chromatic 15y ago
No, because that makes it harder to understand what it's doing. Without looking at an example of working code, how is it possible to say that one particular phrasing is so obviously better than any other that it and it alone should be allowed to exist? I appreciate in Perl very much the postfix conditional expression syntax because it exploits the end weight linguistic property and allows me to emphasize the most important part of the statement when the situation warrants. I believe that makes my code clearer because it looks different from the Algol-standard conditional syntax.
- vorg 15y ago
  > Perl ... allows me to emphasize the most important part of the statement when the situation warrants. Yes. The ordering of elements in a sentence is its "thematic" structure, just as important in communicating as the "transitive" structure of sentences, i.e the relationship between nouns, verbs, etc. Most programming languages copy the transitive structure of natural languages, but not many allow the programmer to freely choose the thematic structure.