How language gives your brain a break

This advice is especially helpful when coding complex conditionals in business logic. (but small enough so you don't need/want a generic rules engine and rules DSL for that.)

dog.bite(man)

or

bite(dog, man)

Another one is the Liskov substitution principle and hyponym substitution. Or polymorphism and word sense disambiguation. There's also a scope thing with co-reference resolution and global variables.

To the follow-up commenters discussing OOP syntax versus function-orientation, I always refer to the monkey quote, which seems relevant here:

The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. - Joe Armstrong

  * + 1 2
    - * + 3 4
        + 5 6
      / 7 8

      1 2 +
  3 4 +
  5 6 + *
    7 8 / - *

    1+2
  *     3+4  
      * 5+6       
    - 7/8

And yes the article seems to be more about language patterns that give your brain a break than language in general.

edit: Apparently that's an old wives tale, the preposition one.

"I shot an elephant in my pajamas... how he got into my pajamas I'll never know."

Not a grammar expert and may be wrong, but I think technically it's unambiguous because you do actually need the while to make John the subject of the verb 'sitting' in that sentence.

Of course you're right that in practice, especially in speech, it could be taken either way and is thus definitely ambiguous. One could argue that's all that matters, I certainly would, but just to be pedantic I thought I'd point this out ;-)

A somewhat related example is center embedding structures, which are grammatical but usually quite difficult to parse once you get a few levels deep:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding

Neither is ambiguous, "the old trash sitting in the kitchen" is unambiguously the direct object in #1; to make "sitting in the kitchen" apply to the subject (John) rather than being part of the phrase identifying the direct object, you'd need either to relocate it and set it off with commas ("John, sitting in the kitchen, threw out the old trash"), or add a "while" ("John threw out the old trash while sitting in the kitchen").

- Mark Twain

From the article: "among languages. Italian appears to be highly optimized for short sentences" - oddly, though, a lot of more 'literary' Italian tends to long, florid phrases that I would consider run-ons in English. "Rhetoric" has been a thing there for thousands of years, after all, after they borrowed it from the Greeks.

    Recursion in Language  (p. 138):

    Our mental stacking power is perhaps slightly stronger in
    language.  The grammatical structure of all languages involves
    setting up quite elaborate push-down stacks, though, to be sure,
    the difficulty of understanding a sentence increases sharply with
    the number of pushes onto the stack.  The proverbial German
    phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which Droll tales of
    absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for
    an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of
    verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since
    lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an
    excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping.  The
    confusion among the audience out-of-order popping from the stack
    onto which the professor's verbs been pushed, is amusing to
    imagine, could engender.  But in normal ken German, such deep
    stacks almost never occur-in fact, native speaker of German often
    unconsciously violate certain conventions which force verb to go
    to the end, in order to avoid the mental effort of keeping track
    of the stack.  Every language has constructions which involve
    stacks, though usually of a less spectacular nature than German.
    But there are always of rephrasing sentences so that the depth of
    stacking is minimal.

    Der Mechaniker,
        auf den wir wegen dem Unfall,
            den wir,
                bevor wir die Stadt,
                    die im Norden liegt,
                erreichen konnten,
            hatten,
        gewartet haben,
    ist endlich angekommen.

    The mechanist,
        for whom because of the accident,
            which,
                before the city,
                    which lies in the North,
                we could reach,
            we had,
        we have waited for,
    has finally arrived.