Programming Languages shouldn't be "too Natural"

Abstract

Despite much research on programming language principles, most often the design of modern languages ignores such principles which results in cumbersome, hard to understand, and error-prone code. We substantiate our claim through a short sampling of the features of some widely used languages and by referring to other criticisms widely publicized in the literature. We argue that a major reason of such an unpleasant state of the art is that programming languages evolve in a way that too much resembles that of natural languages. We advocate a different attitude in programming language design, going back to essentiality and rigorous application of few basic, well-chosen principles.