> Mainly because there doesn't seem to be an optimal language in any meaningful way. Communication seems to work fairly well regardless of language, so it doesn

> Mainly because there doesn't seem to be an optimal language in any meaningful way. Communication seems to work fairly well regardless of language, so it doesn't seem like optimising the language itself really solves any meaningful societal problem. And if there's no clear advantage for one language over another, then people are going to stick with their own. Why is this the case? The same certainly can't be said of, for example, markup and programming languages. C and Python express ideas in very different ways, such that you could not reasonably say that ideas can be communicated equally well in both languages, or that there's no clear advantage of one over the other in a given problem domain. There are indeed some programming languages that simply make it harder to program almost anything you'd want to write, like Cobol, Assembly, or Intercal. Is it really true that natural languages don't have analogous comparability in terms of ergonomics and expressiveness?