Another thing that's easy to forget is that human languages often evolve to be difficult to learn, with this difficulty later being used as a social weapon agai

Another thing that's easy to forget is that human languages often evolve to be difficult to learn, with this difficulty later being used as a social weapon against outsiders and a marker of status. This evolution is at times deliberate, other times accidental, but all languages go through this phase - where there's no such difficulty, insiders invent jargons and slangs to create the barrier. Though now I think of it, programming languages aren't immune from this phenomenon either!