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But Rust is still a controlled language in that there's a language committee updating it. It's just that the committee actually listens to its community.

A true bottoms-up-controlled programming language would have to allow users to redefine keywords and grammar, then allow users to drift the language over time. Eventually you'll have multiple subgroups (accents) and one person's compiler might choke on the line `if x ain't 3`

And its name would be Lisp.

or SQL for that matter. Same same, but different.

_Users_ can't redefine keywords and grammar in SQL, can they? All you can do is create data structures, and write functions and procedures.

Yes, you can write code that creates functions and procedures; it might even be possible to write code that modifies itself, but that still would be essentially different from what one can do in Lisp and Forth.

Forth probably even more, since most things that are statements in other languages can be defined inside Forth, and you can end up easily building mutually incomprehensible DSLs even if they're technically runnable by the same interpreter.

Forth was the other example that came to mind. And possibly Haskell and Scala. But Lisp is the one that's well known with language extensibility as an advertised feature.

> I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively.

I believe that's true for any natural language. To a native speaker, its rules are so natural (almost as breathing) that they hardly ever think about it. Frequently they don't even realize there's a question of picking the right form, because their brain does that job for them.

It's always the foreign learners who have to memorize these rules (which are never "natural" to them).

> > I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively.

> I believe that's true for any natural language. To a native speaker, its rules are so natural (almost as breathing) that they hardly ever think about it. Frequently they don't even realize there's a question of picking the right form, because their brain does that job for them.

I personally rather think that most other languages have a much more complicated grammar than English. So many people learning English as second language are much more used to think of languages in terms of grammar. I, for example, also think of German (my native language) a lot in terms of grammar - OK, the reason might also be that I'm a really mathematical-minded person and heard some lectures about natural language processing (NLP), which further trained me in this kind of thinking (but I also remember that I already did so at the end of primary school).

I can say that some of the more obscure grammar rules of German are also not completely natural to many German speakers. But since in Germany at least in more educated circles there is a culture that using wrong grammar (as a native speaker) leaves a bad impression, you better know some rules to be able to explain why something was right or wrong. To give a common class examples, where a wrong dative instead of a correct genitive is used:

"dem Nachbar sein Sohn" (wrong, since for ownership you have to use a genitive and not a dative; roughly translated with "the neighbour his son"). Correct is "des Nachbars Sohn" ("the neighbour's son"; but this form sounds rather educated in German in opposite to English)

If you want to sound less stilted than "des Nachbars Sohn", you use "der Sohn des Nachbars" (Remark: if you want to troll Germans, ask them whether "der Sohn des Nachbars" or "der Sohn des Nachbarn" is correct. Answer is: both are, cf. http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/beugung-von-...). This uses the correct genitive. Less educated people again use a wrong dative combined with "von": "der Sohn von dem Nachbarn", which is somewhere between very colloquial and wrong, because for ownership you use genitive (both examples would be translated with "the son of the neighbour" in English, but the distinction between these two constructions can't be expressed in English).

Another problem is that there exist some verbs that have a genitive object (these often sound very educated), among these is "gedenken" ("to commemorate"). Because these verbs are not used so often, many less educated people use them wrongly with a dative (which appears more natural, but is wrong). For example "ich gedenke den Verstorbenen" is wrong; correct is "ich gedenke der Verstorbenen" ("I commemorate the deceased", where this grammatical subtlety again cannot be expressed in English).

TLDR: I rather see two reasons: 1. Other languages have a more complicated grammar than English, so that native speakers of other languages think more in terms of grammar. 2. At least in Germany in educated circles there is a culture that using wrong grammar leaves a bad impression. So you better know the rules why something is right or wrong.

> Another problem is that there exist some verbs that have a genitive object (these often sound very educated), among these is "gedenken" ("to commemorate"). Because these verbs are not used so often, many less educated people use them wrongly with a dative (which appears more natural, but is wrong). For example "ich gedenke den Verstorbenen" is wrong; correct is "ich gedenke der Verstorbenen" ("I commemorate the deceased", where this grammatical subtlety again cannot be expressed in English).

I was never taught about such verbs and am glad to know about them, but I think you have a typo in your example; the mistaken dative form should be "dem Verstorbenen", not "den Verstorbenen".

den Verstorbenen is dative plural I think: dative singular would be dem Verstorben.

There seems to be an ambiguity about whether "the deceased" is meant as singular or plural.

Not if the word is "Verstorbenen", right? The extra -en makes it plural.

> Not if the word is "Verstorbenen", right? The extra -en makes it plural.

If we are in the nominative case this is correct. But

"des Verstorbenen": singular, male, genitive

"dem Verstorbenen": singular, male, dative

"den Verstorbenen": either (singular, male, accusative) or (plural, dative)

"die Verstorbenen" ("die" is always used in nominative plural): either (nominative, plural) or (accusative, plural)

In other words: the extra "-n" can be a plural ending or a case ending. Know your declination table inside out and you can find out.

If people are confused about why the oblique cases are all marked on the noun, which is usually not true for accusative and dative singular, "adjectives used as nouns" have weak adjective inflections (for example "für den Angeklagten" 'for the accused', "mit dieser Bekannten" 'with this (female) friend'); my source for this rule and the examples is the Collins German Concise Dictionary 4th ed., pp. 148-9.

This also seems to be the last point discussed in the 2nd paragraph of

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantivierung#Allgemeines_2

which cites the Duden, which I unfortunately don't have.

> I was never taught about such verbs and am glad to know about them

As I said: Most of the verbs requiring a genitive object are erudite and sometimes sound old-fashioned. The most important ones are

verb + genitive object: bedürfen, erwehren (old-fashioned; you normally rather use "er wehrte sich gegen den Angriff" instead of "er erwehrte sich des Angriffs"), gedenken

verb + genitive object + accusative object: anklagen, beschuldigen, bezichtigen (a little old-fashioned), überführen, verdächtigen, zeihen (old-fashioned)

Pro tip: If you really want to write German texts that are supposed to sound ancient (for example when you write fantasy literature) combine verbs requiring genitive objects with the outdated genitives (mein, dein, sein, ihr) instead of (meiner, deiner, seiner, ihrer) of the personal pronouns (ich, du, er/es, sie (singular and plural)). For example:

"doch bei dem Ringe soll er mein gedenken" (I would translate this very loosely with "if he sees the ring he shall commemorate me")

(from the opera "Lohengrin" by Richard Wagner: http://www.rwagner.net/libretti/lohengrin/e-lohen-a3s3.html)

> the mistaken dative form should be "dem Verstorbenen", not "den Verstorbenen".

sbmassey explained it correctly. If you are really interested:

"der Verstorbenen" (genitive): either (female & singular) or plural

"dem Verstorbenen" (dative): (male & singular)

"den Verstorbenen" (dative)": plural

Thanks for the examples!

I was taking "deceased" as singular rather than plural (although it could have been either) so I parsed "den Verstorbenen" as the accusative singular rather than dative plural.

One of the struggles I had with German, as an English-speaker, was that I had to learn two things at once - German, and the structural and nomenclatural rules of grammar.

German vocabulary isn't necessarily the most complicated, since there are so many common root-words with English, and most of the rest is more-or-less logically constructed as compounds of simpler words. This was probably the easier of the two subjects.

However, much more difficult was learning the concept of different cases, genders, conjugations, subject-verb ordering rules, dependent and independent clauses, etc. In English, we just... don't really do that. I think I had done some super-basic sentence diagramming in English classes, but it was really not emphasised much, beyond the basics of "here's the subject, here's the verb, here's the object." Education about English grammar was woefully inadequate, bordering on non-existent, and without any background in Latin, the concepts of different cases, moods or tenses were, pardon the expression, Greek to me. So I was trying to both learn a foreign language, and the entire categorical system of language and grammar at the same time...

I hit this recently with the order of adjectives in English. I never knew this was a thing, and I had an expensive education.

For those who also missed it: We don't say "red big apple". We say "big red apple". There's a set of rules that govern this that we learn naturally but people learning English as a second language have to remember.

Yeah, any self-respecting high school student from Korea would know the rule. (Or at least they used to, back in the late 80s.)

Don't ask how well they fared when faced with an actual English speaker. :/

What is the rule here (I learned English as second language and I know that this ordering of adjectives is commonly used, but don't know the rule behind it)?

See here, for example: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-...

BTW, I learned English in school, too, but have never heard of such a rule. Still, I dare say I intuitively would follow this rule. At least all the "wrong" examples do look wrong to me.

> I don't think there is much controversy here, and the community recognizes the importance of adopting this language change (I read through the RFC and don't remember anyone against it, just differences on the scope of its meaning).

I'd read through it again. I see various people raising fundamental objections to adding the ? syntax for at least the following reasons:

- Not visually distinctive enough (easy to miss)

- Too visually distinctive (noisy, ugly)

- Unnecessary, try! is fine

- Prevents using the ? symbol for something else

- Should have a normal exception system instead (i.e. early return is implied on every call)

- Should have monadic bind syntax instead, like Haskell's do

Which is fine; when you invite everyone to express their opinion, you get a /lot/ of opinions. There was still a pretty broad consensus in favor.

The RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/243

(note for anyone using 'search in page': the issue page hides hundreds of comments in the middle unless you click a button, which even then only reveals 200 at a time; search for "not shown")

You are right, though my reading was it that generally while those points were brought up, they were debated and there was consensus on direction. Perhaps my wording of no one "against" it was wrong, but generally the debate was good and came to a conclusive direction.

It's nice to not see something stagnate.