>Without an oxford comma, a four letter list sounds like "This...that...c and d do that!"
It sounds more like: bit, bat, bot and bet do that to my ears. E.g the list flows in a continuous motion, and the "and" just denotes the last item ("and finally"), something like x:xs in Haskell but in reverse! "this, that, c : d do that"
>which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence about the final two things.
This sounds like a projection, not from the sound of the phrase, but from your a priori idea about what the oxford comma would do there (e.g that it would evenly split the items of the list).
I think the programmers among us are infected by the use of punctuation marks as part of the syntax. Many programming languages just hijack punctuations marks: C's field.selector is plain silly when you think about it and about the fact that the colon was available; and now something less natural than the period must be used to separate statements. As for Haskell, I find that the ML family is IMO quite remarkable for its tradition of terrible syntax choices (again, why x:xs when x,xs was an option? And that convention of putting commas at the beginning of a line!?).
It seems to me that arguing about what a comma means when put in this or that place is symptomatic of this programmer mindset. Natural languages are ambiguous, redundant and sometimes inconsistent by non-design. And so is their punctuation. Nobody understand punctuation, especially programmers.
It sounds more like: bit, bat, bot and bet do that to my ears. E.g the list flows in a continuous motion, and the "and" just denotes the last item ("and finally"), something like x:xs in Haskell but in reverse! "this, that, c : d do that"
>which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence about the final two things.
This sounds like a projection, not from the sound of the phrase, but from your a priori idea about what the oxford comma would do there (e.g that it would evenly split the items of the list).