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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:22060

On 23/03/2012 04:16, Steve Howell wrote:
> On Mar 22, 8:20 pm, rusi<rustompm...@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>  On Mar 23, 7:42 am, Steve Howell<showel...@yahoo.com>  wrote:
>>
>>  >  Do you think we'll always have a huge number of incompatible
>>  >  programming languages?  I agree with you that it's a fact of life in
>>  >  2012, but will it be a fact of life in 2062?
>>
>>  It will be a fact of life wherever Godels theorem is; which put
>>  simplistically is: consistency and completeness cannot coexist.  This
>>  is the 'logic-generator' for the mess in programming languages.
>>  Put in more general terms:
>>  Completeness is an 'adding' process
>>  Consistency is a 'subtracting' process
>>  Running the two together, convergence is hopeless.
>
> Fair enough, but I don't think you can blame Godel's Theorem for the
> fact that JS, Ruby, Perl, and PHP all solve basically the same
> problems as Python in 2012.  Can't we agree that at least *Perl* is
> redundant, and that the lingering existence of Perl 5 is an artifact
> of culture, legacy, and primitive experimentation (by future
> standards), not mathematical inevitability?
>
Perl's support for Unicode is much better than the others.

>>  In programming language terms the pull is between simplicity and
>>  expressivity/power.
>
> Sure, you can see this tension between Python (simplicity) and Ruby
> (expressivity).  My idea of progress--way before 2062--is that you'd
> still have a spectrum of simplicity and expressivity, but the level of
> elegance and power throughout the spectrum would be elevated.  There
> wouldn't be a monoculture, but the cream would eventually rise toward
> the top.
>