Home at Last, or, The Last Programming Language I Will Ever Learn

English is not dominant because it is a 'good enough' language - its dominant because the 2 successive superpowers in the last 2 centuries speak English. There are nearly 200 countries in the UN and about 70 of them are former British colonies. Are you seriously arguing that in, say Nigeria, there was a 'fair' or 'utilitarian' trial of languages and English 'just happened' to be better than the dozens of languages there (repeat this argument 70 times).

> It's spoken by the most influential and powerful countries on earth. This is not accidental, but perhaps an important underlying cause for their success.

This statement is demonstrable nonsense - you are confusing correlation with causation.

With the appropriate infrastructure ANY LANGUAGE can be made to support all the intellectual pursuits of the modern world. Anything from Nuclear Physics to Psychology can be appropriately represented in ANY human language - including ones that don't yet exist - with the application of sufficient resources.

The example that demonstrates that is Gallaudet University n the US - the Deaf University http://www.gallaudet.edu/

All the courses are taught through the medium of Sign Language (the written language is English because Sign doesn't have a written form). Interesting enough fact fans, Deaf Americans speak French, not English (or more accurately British Sign Language).

> English will certainly outlast Chinese.

That's a conjecture at best. Chinese has so far outlasted any language still actively spoken on the planet. In fact, the Chinese writing system is the oldest continually used writing system. The cultural heritage behind this is huge.

And while you're certainly right that India has had a lot of English influence, you shouldn't forget the recent colonization history of India. It's still part of the Commonwealth, in fact. And when I say 'recent' I mean that in terms of some couple of centuries. I have no means of predicting the political state of the world in another couple of centuries. Do you? Thus, I'd be careful to make claims such as "X is going to outlast Y," except you've got very good reason to do so.

> You can see indentation in a text document\program, but you have to add extra syntax in spoken language to convey this.

You're forgetting prosody and gestures, which are an integral part of spoken language. Also, natural language has 'pragmatics,' a process of eliciting and cancelling implicatures and presuppositions. Natural language is anything but linear or sequential. In fact there's usually several layers of information-transfer going on at once.

> Internal language recognition\parsing is incredibly LISP like.

Nope, it isn't. First of all, we have no idea what's going on internally. Neurolinguistics and neuropsychology aren't far enough yet, and at this point, it's just guess work. But what we do know, is that LISP and natural languages live in entirely different complexity classes of language. LISP is context free - and natural language isn't. Probably, it's not quite context sensitive yet, but probably somewhere in between (there's dozens of disjoint sets of language complexity classes between those two.) LISP cannot create, for example, cross-serial dependencies, like they occur in swiss German and Danish are in a complexity class not provided for by LISP-like grammars.

I know about "chunking." In fact, I'm doing research in a related subject (computational semantics and formalisms for representing meaning.) It would all be well and good: you have chunks and operators, and then you write the grammar, and voilá, you've got your NL parser. Just that it's not that easy. Anaphora resolution, world knowledge and linguistic knowledge, pragmatics, weird syntactical phenomena (say, pied piping, etc.) have made this infinitely harder. If all you want to parse is "Hey, give me a hot dog," we've been here for the past 30 or 40 years. That's not hard. If you want to parse the English Wikipedia, it's impossible. You can only approximate.

The differences between spoken languages are vast. The differences between functional and imperative languages (because that's what you're referring to, I think) are minuscule in comparison. I can learn the functional paradigm and pick up any functional language within weeks, probably less (for example, I can read and write Erlang, OCaml, ML and LISP, even though I only really know Haskell and Lua.) In order to learn a new language (even a closely related one, like say from English to Swedish) you'd take at least a year in order to even be able to understand basic conversation or news. It's mostly the vocabulary, but also the speed and the multiple layers of information transfer that I alluded to earlier that make this a lot harder.

It sounds like you've given the topic some thought, but your ideas seem (to me!) all too reminiscent of the optimism computer scientists had in the 50s to 70s or so. People thought computer systems comprehending natural language were just a stone's throw away, because, hey we had all the basic machinery! Well, they weren't. It seems language is a lot more complicated than we all initially thought.

I agree about Clojure's rough edges. I'm a beginner, and when something goes wrong it is very opaque to me what happened. That said, I do enjoy the language--especially the baked-in data structures.

English is currently hot, just as e.g. French was before it, but I'd expect that to start changing within the next, say 20 years. I'd expect the US to lose more and more relevance while China is gaining. Something could screw that up, you can never predict the future with any accuracy but I would give these events a higher probability than English becoming the global language.

>There is no one language. There cannot be one.

Especially when you consider that language isn't just spoken words. It's a whole way of thinking. A big part of the culture itself. That's not going to just die off because English speakers are too lazy to learn any other languages.