So much for that....

[John Tsangaris]

>true.  To non-programmers, it will always be obvious that programming
>languages can't be expressive, and there's nothing you could possibly
>do to convince them otherwise.


But that's the same as saying because you don't speak spanish, it isn't 
expressive. Of
course you can't express anything in a language you do not speak.

The only difference between spanish and perl is that there are enough 
people physically
speaking spanish to make a huge uproar if the government said "spanish is 
not a recognized
language, and is not covered under free speech".  Who speaks perl?  Of the 
5 geeks (I would
like to be one of them. :-)  ) that probably speak full time perl in the 
US, how many of those are
going to solicit understanding from politicians, and if 100% of them make 
noise.. who's going
to hear 5 out of 275,000,000?

If there was a large enough group of people able to communicate solely via 
perl (many people
speak spanish AND english) and still get a concept across, then politicians 
would be forced to
accept it as expressive.

I almost feel it's worth doing.  If perl was a recognized expressive 
language, then passing laws
on what you can and can't say are going to be very difficult.

John