"I really feel like you're selling an awful lot of the programming language design world short here." You may be right about that :-) Although now I realize m

"I really feel like you're selling an awful lot of the programming language design world short here." You may be right about that :-) Although now I realize my words didn't exactly convey what I intended to say, see below. "An awful lot of what programming language design is about is making it easy to precisely express what you mean, in a way that will make sense to future programmers, be robust in the face of changes, and so on." Actually this is more what I was actually thinking when I said "the core assumption remains unchallenged". There are ways to program that don't assume you're trying to build a robust, unambiguous and precise meaning (and which are therefore much more adequate for non-technical users). But these ways have not been explored in depth, and are not known to the general mass of developers. There is a lively conversation at the original blog, would you mind to move the conversation there, to keep it at one place? http://programmingzen.com/2014/11/27/programming-languages-as-languages/#comment-28865 http://programmingzen.com/2014/11/27/programming-languages-a... "Your mind must work fairly differently from mine if you find XML a natural way to reason." I was not thinking of XML as natural, but of "creating instruction sets that work as recipies and can produce different executable code, so their meaning changes depending on the context on which they're executed". :-D This is the way that humans follow instructions when they receive orders. It's what makes the following a joke: Q. How did the programmer die in the shower? A. He read the shampoo bottle instructions: Lather. Rinse. Repeat. P.S. (BTW, how do you create those intended quote blocks? I don't know how to do it)