Asked on Reddit: Which of Rust, D, Go, Nim, and Crystal is the strongest and why?

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 16:34:59 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 08:54:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> So the implication that use of the nonstandard form would lead 
>> to confusion is pure pedantry."
>
> Yes, indeed.
>
> Much of the difficulty with discussions of language in the 
> modern world comes from not making a distinction between its 
> denotative and connotative aspects.  The former relates to what 
> is actually being said, and the latter to all the other 
> thoughts and impressions that are evoked by saying it in that 
> way.
>
> Modern people emphasize excessively the denotative aspects, 
> whereas connotations do matter since - as the neuroscience 
> tells us - there are subtle priming effects and there are 
> consequences from shifting the brain into different modes.
>
> That's perhaps also in part why people do care about syntax in 
> computer languages, even though at one level anything precise 
> might be felt to do the job.
>
> Back to your point, many non-Western cultures have different 
> kinds of speech according to the social context.  That's 
> because wanting to do so is a human group thing, not a DWEM 
> thing.  Of course in the past years there was a relaxation of 
> standards of formality due to concerns over it creating a 
> noxious and unwarranted exclusivity.  That may have been a good 
> thing in some ways.  But I think every human group will 
> ultimately need to retain distinctions between different 
> registers of speaking and writing...

My point was not so much formal vs non-formal speech but the fact 
that a lot of these decisions are linguistically (not socially) 
arbitrary, often counter intuitive, and made by people who want 
to draw a line between their own (privileged) group and others 
they do not deem worthy of the same privileges. Again in the 
words of Pinker:

"Perhaps most importantly, since prepscriptive rules are so 
psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the 
right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, 
differentiating the elite from the rabble."

I couldn't put it better myself. There's no linguistic reason why 
double negatives shouldn't be in the standard varieties of 
English. (Greek logic != linguistic logic)