How English Became the Global Language

Hackers are lazy, in the same way that mathematicians and modernist architects are lazy: they hate anything extraneous. It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were. The most important kind of succinctness comes from making the language more abstract. It is to get this that we use highlevel languages in the first place. So it would seem that the more of it you can get, the better. A language designer should always be looking at programs and asking, is there some way to express this in fewer tokens? If you can do something that makes many different programs shorter, it's probably not a coincidence: you've probably discovered a useful new abstraction. It's a mistake to try to baby the user with long-winded expressions meant to resemble English. Cobol is notorious for this flaw ...»