>improbably that the current-era languages are at (or anywhere near) the local optima of their respective niches.
Your statement is true (e.g. Javascript/C++/etc syntax is suboptimal and could be better). However it's a separate concept from what grandparent posters' grabcocque and visarga are talking about. If we engage with their point, it's not a "cop-out" but stating an important fundamental truth about the syntax of all programming languages. Many beginners do not know this truth as can be seen by the following questions in the wild:
The top voted answers in each case tries to explain it using analogies. (e.g. hammer is wrong tool for driving screws, etc). However, I'm not sure they actually provide the insight needed to make the questioner understand that creating the "One Universal Programming Language" is mathematically impossible. It's not possible to express multiple disparate concepts using finite characters with minimum string length for ease of typing and reading. All desirable concepts cannot simultaneously share the same minimal syntax for convenience. (This impossibility is also not solved by splitting concepts via language-vs-library as in "language reserved keywords" vs "library function calls".)
(As an educational exercise, we could ask the questioner to try to invent a "One Universal Programming Language". He would soon run into contradictions rooted in trying to express multiple concepts via finite symbols. Eventually of those concepts he desires will end up being encoded with noisier and inconvenient syntax.)
Why can't there be an “universal” programming language that serves all purposes?
It could be argued that x86-64 is a universal programming language that currently serves all purposes across a very wide swath of all computation, modulo a number of interpreters, compilers, and VMs. Even that doesn't take care of literally all, however.
Your statement is true (e.g. Javascript/C++/etc syntax is suboptimal and could be better). However it's a separate concept from what grandparent posters' grabcocque and visarga are talking about. If we engage with their point, it's not a "cop-out" but stating an important fundamental truth about the syntax of all programming languages. Many beginners do not know this truth as can be seen by the following questions in the wild:
- Why can't there be an “universal” programming language that serves all purposes? : https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4889...
- ELI5: Why isn't there a universal programming language? : https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2v84/el...
- Why are there so many programming languages? : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4334954/why-are-there-so...
- Why there are so many programming languages? Can't we create one language to do everything? : https://www.quora.com/Why-there-are-so-many-programming-lang...
The top voted answers in each case tries to explain it using analogies. (e.g. hammer is wrong tool for driving screws, etc). However, I'm not sure they actually provide the insight needed to make the questioner understand that creating the "One Universal Programming Language" is mathematically impossible. It's not possible to express multiple disparate concepts using finite characters with minimum string length for ease of typing and reading. All desirable concepts cannot simultaneously share the same minimal syntax for convenience. (This impossibility is also not solved by splitting concepts via language-vs-library as in "language reserved keywords" vs "library function calls".)
(As an educational exercise, we could ask the questioner to try to invent a "One Universal Programming Language". He would soon run into contradictions rooted in trying to express multiple concepts via finite symbols. Eventually of those concepts he desires will end up being encoded with noisier and inconvenient syntax.)