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Comment by lignuist | Hacker News Reader

I don't expect that there ever will be a perfect or optimal programming language. There is also no perfect natural language.

I would rather say, that the language is just a vehicle and especially beginners identify themselves too much with their preferred language, while more advanced programmer think more in terms of concepts.

You can solve most of the problems with any of the existing languages. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses, but I would say this pretty much balances out, the more different problems you try to solve with a language.

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> I don't expect that there ever will be a perfect or optimal programming language.

I agree for the present, because of (among other things) the degree to which modern programming languages contain explicit references to particular hardware limitations and problems. The fact that resources are drawn from stack, heap and mechanical storage device, and the existence of rules for choosing which is appropriate, only tells us how primitive modern languages are.

Mathematics might stand as a counterexample (of a universal language) if it were easier to use for programming -- but that problem is being addressed, and computer languages become more like mathematics as time passes.

I disagree that mathematics is a universal language. Yes, "everyone" understands that 1 + 1 = 2 (most of the time, anyway), but that's not all there is to mathematics. There are vast numbers of different branches of mathematics, often compatible but also often incompatible (in both notation and semantics). There is a fairly common core of mathematical syntax, but beyond that different branches will use their own syntax. Perhaps that's like Lisps: the same fundamental meta-syntax but significantly different and often incompatible semantics and syntax on top of that.

I wasn't arguing that mathematics is a universal language, only that it approaches the ideal more closely than the present generation of computer programming languages.

> There is a fairly common core of mathematical syntax, but beyond that different branches will use their own syntax.

The fact that mathematics has many divisions isn't a counterargument unless mathematicians use different notations to refer to the same things. Apart from notoriously overused Greek letters, notations are unique and independent.

Spoken languages have many distinct vocabularies to serve the needs of specialists, but this doesn't undermine the usefulness of the language as a general tool. Same with mathematics.

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