[OT] On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages

[Paul Backus]

On Sunday, 15 November 2020 at 01:40:08 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
wrote:
> I am not sure what is meant by expressiveness in general.
>
> For instance, Rust seems to be the first and only language 
> where the lifetime of objects in memory can be expressed at 
> compile time. Is Rust expressive or not?

Expressive compared to what? I think pretty much everyone would 
agree that Rust is more expressive than, say, Brainfuck, but some 
would probably argue that it is less expressive than Lisp.

Of course, that's a rather hand-wavy explanation. If you want to 
understand how this kind of intuitive sense of relative 
expressiveness can be modeled mathematically, that's what the 
linked presentation is all about. :)