Your last sentence could be rewritten "It is better to express things in as few ways as possible", or "Having fewer ways to express something is better". English, however, allows you to omit the main verb for the causation in a parallel construction, you were able to write it shorter, and with a 3-syllable climax after a pause at the end for effect.
Shouldn't programming languages also provide many different ways to express things?
Without looking at an example of working code, how is it possible to say that one particular phrasing is so obviously better than any other that it and it alone should be allowed to exist?
I appreciate in Perl very much the postfix conditional expression syntax because it exploits the end weight linguistic property and allows me to emphasize the most important part of the statement when the situation warrants. I believe that makes my code clearer because it looks different from the Algol-standard conditional syntax.
Yes. The ordering of elements in a sentence is its "thematic" structure, just as important in communicating as the "transitive" structure of sentences, i.e the relationship between nouns, verbs, etc. Most programming languages copy the transitive structure of natural languages, but not many allow the programmer to freely choose the thematic structure.
Perhaps there'll only be a small number of languages that people learn, so people will have a "native" programming language in the way people have a native natural language.
die unless $file;
if (!$file){
die;
}
Is simple.wikipedia.org really better than wikipedia.org for the average English speaker? If your only argument is that simpler language lets more people understand, why bother saying words like "unknowable"? Why not say "not knowable"? Isn't it superfluous to have these words in your vocabulary?
Being able to accurately express an idea quickly has it's value.
I work with about a dozen Perl developers and there are only a couple of us that know a significant portion of the language. Problems occur when someone uses a less common piece of syntax and no one else knows what it does. Everyone has their favorite ways to do things and people tend to have very strong preferences. This makes for code that is much more difficult to understand.
English is a far more complex topic. I am not sure where to even begin. I do think that it helps for a group of people to share a common set of language prescriptions.
Was this incorrect? Was explaining your point of view inefficient or causing problems in understanding? I think you inadvertently showed how expressive language has enormous benefits, even if people can never understand it 100%.
You don't have to know all of those to be a good Perl developer. You have to know how to read the documentation.
Everyone has their favorite ways to do things and people tend to have very strong preferences.
None of that sounds like a programming language problem.
Having more ways a statement can be interpreted does not make it easier to identify the correct interpretation, so I don't think this is really a reason people have a harder time understanding code or mathematical notation than they do their native language.
And mathematical notation offers plenty of ways to express a given statement (transform with De Morgan's law, contraposition, shuffling and negating quantifiers, etc.).
There are those adept in theory that can't practice well, but that's because to practice the art means dealing with a plethora of hacks, exceptions and miscellaneous trivia completely unrelated to the core problem at hand.
Personally, I don't think the answer is becoming 'fluent' in handling the exceptions and idiosyncrasies of the chosen language, framework and platform. Rather we need to work on building a notation that provides better abstraction mechanisms.