Just thought I'd add this paragraph from Larry Wall's Natural Language Principles in Perl. I guess you could
take it either way, but in the end I guess your own predilection
is going to decide whether
you find coding for ordinary folks useful or not. Anyway.
No theoretical axes to grind
Natural languages are used by people who for the most part don't give a rip how elegant the design of their
language is. Except for a few writers striving to make a point in the most efficient way possible, ordinary folks
scatter all sorts of redundancy throughout their communication to make sure of being understood. They use
whatever words come to hand to get their point across, and work at it till they beat the thing to death. Normally
this ain't a problem. They're quite willing to learn a new word occasionally if they see that it will be useful, but
unlike lawyers or computer scientists, they feel little need to define lots of new words before they say what
they want to say. In terms of computer languages, this argues for predefining the commonly used concepts so
that people don't feel the need to make so many definitions. Quite a few Perl scripts contain no definitions at
all. I dare you to find a C++ program without a definition.
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