The article explores Gottfried Leibniz's aspiration to create a characteristica universalis, a perfect language that encapsulated all scientific truths, suggesting parallels with modern programming languages. While these languages strive for expressiveness and clarity—aiming to eliminate ambiguity and errors—they often fall short of Leibniz's ideal. The discussion introduces Objective-C, a polarizing language that, despite criticism for its verbosity, highlights the personal nature of language preference in programming, shaped by one’s initial experiences with coding. Ultimately, the pursuit of a universal programming language remains an ongoing challenge with subjective interpretations of expressiveness.
Objective-C is, at best, polarizing. Ridiculed for its unrelenting verbosity and peculiar square brackets, it is used only for building Mac and iPhone apps.
A version of Leibniz's dream lives on today in programming languages, which aim to create expressive code that leaves no dark corners for bugs.
Gottfried Leibniz envisioned a perfect language for scientific truth, which modern programming languages attempt to emulate but fall short of.
Expressiveness in programming languages is subjective, shaped significantly by the first language learned, reflecting personal taste and experience.
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