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Comment by Smaug123 | Hacker News Reader

Why is there not a universal way of writing anything that is not ambiguous and can be read by anyone that understands the 'language'? Because humans have a tendency to defy attempts at classification and constraint. Constructed real-world languages (Lojban, Esperanto) haven't really taken off, while non-constructed languages mix and match whenever they feel like it ("le parking", "Schadenfreude"). The same is true in maths: people use what is easiest.

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Because whenever we read something we have to guess the meaning. To the human mind, all communications are inherently contextual and metaphorical. To put it another way each individual has his own internal private language into which everything he reads must be translated.

It's as if we truly believe that 0 is positive charged and 1 is negative charged.

Or to take us a step further, that a certain arrangements of electrons is "negative" and the inverse arrangement is "positive"

I often tell CS people that everything in computing is metaphor and it honestly disturbs me that 80% of the time I get blank looks.

> I often tell CS people that everything in computing is metaphor and it honestly disturbs me that 80% of the time I get blank looks

This is why people think Machine "Learning" means that the Singularity is near.

> Why is there not a universal way of writing anything that is not ambiguous and can be read by anyone that understands the 'language'?

You mean like Lojban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban) ?

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