I think Larry Wall's theory of language development is interesting and the long term failure of Perl shows interesting ways in which computer language developme

I think Larry Wall's theory of language development is interesting and the long term failure of Perl shows interesting ways in which computer language development and natural language development are rather different. 1) Natural language doesn't have to worry about backward compatibility in the same way. The exact meaning of older phrases don't have to coexist with those of new phrases. 2) Natural language doesn't have to recruit new users in the same way. I think Spanish is one of the easiest commonly spoken languages - if a random person speaking no commonly-spoken-in-the-world language had to choose languages, Spanish would be ideal. English is weird in saying things with idioms, Chinese has tones and complex characters, etc. English has evolved in a perl-like fashion and if it was a programming 3) No children learn perl or any programming language as their "first language". Everyone learning perl had to wade through it's modes and variable names like "_" and translate them to their internal concept language. (should add: verbs like "be", "do", "have" etc are very fuzzy in English as well as proposition "like" "to", "from", at etc but this fuzziness is incorporated as a person learns the language. But adding an equivalent weirdness to a language someone is just learning isn't necessarily going to be appreciated). 4) Communicating with other humans is arguably a key function of computer languages as well as natural languages. But computer language do also have to communicate exact to descriptions to the very dumb devices known as computers. So "getting the gist" and "getting it exactly" have to be somewhat close and makes "there's more than one way to do things" more problematic, especially as ways to do things multiply.