Perl6's ^^

Posted Feb 19, 2015 15:25 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Perl6's ^^ by niner
Parent article: Scalar typing in the PHP world

High-level abstractions and fullness are good but "There is more than one way" goes too far beyond fullness. Fullness is not the point here.

Natural languages have redundancy, semantic overlap, fuzziness, assumptions,... These have pros and cons; one (limited) purpose: expressing nuances. In pure technical communications nuances are completely unnecessary; even harmful in programming languages and any specification. For instance a natural language like English is so poorly suited to protocol specification that readers typically complain that they feel like they are reading a new, foreign language.

For driving machines (including machines that could kill), a language model to follow is not natural languages but maths: high-level, expressive, very limited redundancy and most importantly of all: unambiguous. Who wants machines to do something... "maybe"? Merely changing the vocabulary is fine since this does not change the properties, however adding assumptions and/or redundancy only brings confusion with users constantly wondering about what they are reading.

[BTW you don't seriously think that a redundant and inconsistent ^^ operator brings Perl closer to natural languages, do you?]