Comment by Chris2048 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chris2048 | Hacker News Reader

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> Why invent new programming languages when you've got C?

The practicalities of PLs aren't at all like spoken natural languages. For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

Secondly:

> Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

What the OP thinks is irrelevant, it's whether this would be desirable or not. It would also not be a "do this now" thing and more of "in years to come, humanity will do this".

I think mankind will one day set foot on mars, and this effort will be a good thing - this does not mean I should be willing to be put on a rocket today.

> The practicalities of PLs aren't at all like spoken natural languages. For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

But not with equal effort. Machines have been developed to run specific languages (Burroughs mainframes - Algol 60; Lisp Machines - Lisp), and languages have been developed to run on specific machines (C - PDP-11).

    For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

A counter example to this is that any children can be taught any language. The fact that an adult can't learn new languages as easily speaks more to the architecture of the computer (brain) than to its capacity to run various languages.

I suppose - although a language would probably die out if children couldn't learn it - or the unlearnable parts in any case.

The clause "with little effort" is not counteracted though - for a computer this represents a short download-and-install of a compiler/interpreter.

Even writing a compiler may take the same amount of time it takes to learn a language from scratch.

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