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>not everything can be a linguistic structure/syntax/grammar. Says who? Why should I believe this?

• taeric 12y ago
  Says experience. Tritely, why should I believe the contrary? I've certainly seen it tried enough. Yet to work. There is also the parallel to spoken languages. Where there are pretty good patterns of speach for making different points. Why haven't all of those been converted to simply an atomic linguistic structure.
  • Retra 12y ago
    Experience would have told you that human flight was impossible just 110 years ago. The reason you should believe the contrary is because it is an open world, and there is not proof that you are correct. >There is also the parallel to spoken languages. Where there are pretty good patterns of speach for making different points. And programming is largely a domain specific task today, so you could have pretty good patterns for it. But anyway, that parallel expresses a better point: language is extensible. If you have something in another spoken language to express, you can certainly do it in any other language. You just can't maximize terseness everywhere, which is not what we're using to measure how good a language is. The measure for this is terseness in proportion to usage, which doesn't conflict that rule. Especially if you can control terseness dynamically.
    • taeric 12y ago
      And, for the longest time, banking on a miracle flying device would have been a terrible idea. Language is less extensible and more just plain mutable. Consider the phrase "firing rate" when applied to an archer. Something tells me this mutability is not a selling point around here.