Programming languages are obfuscating, in the same way that degrees and job descriptions are obfuscating. The political economy of this is intriguing.
In all activities, humans are doing very similar things. But for the purpose of "laning" or "putting people into manageable boxes" we often create barriers of language which establish structures of containment, and then we gatekeep the containers.
Anyway ... programming languages :
- 1. consumers want to code for conveniences like journals and calculators ( want code that looks like English )
- 2. business users want to build services and distribution channels ... websites and apps, and generally CRUD apps ( want semantics that handle network scaling issues efficiently )
- 3. analysts with varying rigour want to crunch numbers ( want performance, but also code that looks like science, maths, and formal logic )
- ( game developers are some combination of 2. and 3. )
- 4. engineers who spend way too much time working for (2, 3) are more concerned with performance and reliability ( code must present more details of hardware architecture, and the layout of data in memory )
... and generally it is not easy to find a single tool that caters to everyone's needs.
But ultimately everyone's needs are the same, and so a tool should exist which serves everyone, with an opt-in for any specifics.
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