Irrational Exuberance

You are writing a comment about Spoken Languages, Blub, and Convenience, here is a quick summary:

A brief essay considering the link between spoken languages and programming languages and Paul Graham's theory of Blub.

You are responding to this comment written by JW on May 26th 2008, 06:32.

Well, in fact, the same holds for programming languages. Most widely used, general-purpose languages are Turing-complete, which means they can compute any Turing-computable function (see Wikipedia). So, if you can write a solution to a problem in one Turing-complete programming language, you can theoretically also write that exact same solution in any other Turing-complete language.

In practice, however, solving a problem in one language might be a piece of cake, while solving the same problem in another language might be almost impossible, but not completely impossible.

So while in theory both programming languages are equally powerful (you can express the same solutions in both), it might be a lot harder and take a lot more work to do so in one of both, similarly to how expressing "the week after the next week" takes (a lot) more work in English than in Japanese.

Please be aware that comment forms go stale after one hour.

@@ ruby
def a (b, c):
  b * c
end
@@

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