[OT] On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 16 November 2020 at 17:09:16 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> For example, they removed traditional for-loops from Swift 
> because they can be expressed via while loops or foreach loops.
>
> But that doesn't help when what I need is a for loop. Syntax 
> sugar has tangible benefit that shouldn't be dismissed.

Yes, human factors and programming culture should not take a back 
seat to the math perspective when designing a language.  In some 
sense it is good that many programmers now get trained on Python, 
so that we have shared frame of references and conceptualizations.

We can create minimalistic expressive languages, but the 
resulting code is hard to read for most humans, in some sense the 
programming language should allow us to express algorithms in 
terms of our physical experience which we often use to understand 
complicated systems: objects, actions, roles, 
stereotypes/concepts/interfaces/subclasses, actors...

Anyway, there is a cross cutting field in CS that try to abstract 
the semantics of various programminglanguages to find the essence 
of programming language design, I guess it is comparable to how 
category theory tries to describe key patterns i math.