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Comment by commentzorro | Hacker News Reader

This is the ??? (I don't know what to describe it as) post here. You took the one sentence I just loved from the article and pooped on it. Then tried to tie it in with details of a non syntax related item and process. Next, you said a two character syntax for describing something as complex as an if statement was somehow too much burden?!

Not sure what the future of programming languages is. But if humans are involved I suspect there will be a visual representation. And that means syntax. And that syntax will matter then just as it does now.

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I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. This is my opinion; I didn't expect it to receive a warm reception.

If you went to a horse and buggy convention 150 years ago and told them that it would all be gone soon, they would have virulent reaction, right? They would say that metal contraptions have been tried before and failed, that humans have been using horses for travel for thousands of years and if so if humans are involved, it will mean horses. This isn't to prove my point but to draw caution to yours.

Note that I understand your position quite well but that you clearly don't remotely understand anything that I've written. That should raise a flag. Instead of getting mad, you should be getting curious.

Not mad ... not sad ... not misunderstanding. Just weirded out by the use of non sequiturs to crap on a thought you didn't like.

I am a PL researcher and I too believe you may not fully understand what's going on.

To keep your analogy, the idea that a PL needs syntax to be used is comparable to the idea that a vehicle needs acceleration to get moving. Different flavors of syntax correspond to different means of propulsion.

Perhaps we will find good way to get rid of context free grammars (the horses in your example) and replace them with automatic pruning of parse forests (the current Tesla car of compilers) or even something more fancy like semantic editors (a fusion engine in your example) but unless you change the laws of physics, you can't get a vehicle without an accelerating engine nor a PL without an input syntax.

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