[OT] On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages

Sun Nov 15 01:40:08 UTC 2020

On Sunday, 15 November 2020 at 01:01:09 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> What do we mean when we say that one programming language is 
> "more expressive" than another? Is it just a matter of opinion 
> and personal taste, or is there some underlying objective 
> truth? And is more expressiveness necessarily a good thing?

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?