Re:The Crystal Programming Language
by thegenius2000 on Monday December 19, 2016 @02:13AM
(#13209963)
Another point is that a lingua franca is a common tongue for communication between people with different mother-tongues: not a replacement for native languages. For example in East & Central Africa Swahili is used for cross-communication, but individual ethnic groups maintain their cultural identities by holding onto their own languages. In this sense, I don't think you could easily find a developer who would struggle to understand anything (simple enough) written in Python, even though they don't use it on a day-to-day basis, so I think languages like Ruby/Python are already sufficient lingua francas for today's developers.
One more thing, maths notation is ridiculously diverse and overloaded and is in no way entirely uniform -- or even close. This is a problem when the disparity exists within a branch of maths, but an advantage when it's between very different areas, such as Analysis and Combinatorics.
Another one is that programming languages have more in common with mechanisms that natural languages.
You could also say that we do have a few lingua franca programming languages which are also very similar to each other, to the point that someone fluent in one can easily read another.
Also, what do you think are the odds that a mathematician can understand the intricacies of a fluid engineering paper (in a natural language) and vice versa?