> I think it'd be nice to see efforts like this, where language designers drop on the floor every concern about familiarity or similarity to existing languages and just find out what results in the most powerful language (in general, or in a particular domain).

To my mind the purpose of a programming language is to bridge the gap between what a human can understand and what the computer can do. So I don't think you can draw a clear line between ease of learning and the value of the language; there will always be cases where you need to talk to a domain expert, so it needs to be easy to translate between the programming language and the human domain, which means there's a lot of value in familiarity.

I think the ideal language would look much like the way people explain what they do to other people (kind of an extension of the idea that the best programming languages look like pseudocode). Most fields of human endeavour rely on a limited amount of domain-specific jargon, but not a completely different alphabet, mathematics being a notable exception - if notation were truly a powerful tool for thought in general, wouldn't we expect to see more of it in other complex professions? Indeed I think a lot of existing language design has gone wrong by sticking far too closely to mathematics; for example, operator precedence massively complicates a language, but is really only used to support arithmetic, which is really quite a niche case. (And so it makes sense that APL-family languages might be successful as domain languages for mathematics, but I don't ever expect them to break out beyond that niche).

Python rightly has a good reputation syntax wise, though it persists with mathematical-style function application, overly cumbersome keyword constructs, and awkward special-casing of operators; the code I've seen that's looked most like English sentences (in shape) is probably Haskell or Scala when written in an operator-light style, with lines formed of space-separated words (even if the words themselves are unfamiliar) - Scala supports more of a "subject verb object" style, but sometimes requires brackets.

In terms of what's missing, I think a lot of the tools we use to structure text on a larger scale aren't there - imagine having to write an instruction manual using only plain text with no headings or chapters or the like. But on the small scale, yogothos has got to me; I don't think we should quite go all the way to lisp, but we do need less syntax rather than more. I'm thinking Python-style grouping (indentation and colons), Haskell-style function application (spaces), Smalltalk-style control flow (none). Most syntactic constructs take expressions (including e.g. method bodies), a block acts as an expression (evaluating to its last line). A few syntactic shortcuts, only where they're generally applicable enough to be worth the overhead: Scala's _ for lambdas, maybe Haskell's $, but not a lot else; I think it's worth using symbols for syntax, stuff that breaks the normal rules of the language, precisely to distinguish those things from regular well-behaved functions.

Sound pretty uninspired, middle-of-the-road? Yeah, it is; I really don't think the current state of the art in syntax is that far away from optimal. If I was trying to design a custom language I'd be a lot more concerned about implementing a good record system, about effect systems, about stage polymorphism.

> But don't you think it's mind boggling, and perhaps even a little hypocritical, that we spend up to around two decades of our lives in education (with a bunch of fluff that somebody always argues might be useful some day). And then after that, learning a new tool that would require more than a few weekends is no-no? I find it quite absurd.

Yeah. TBH our whole industry's attitude towards experience and career history is a mess; I highly doubt that an unbroken chain of programming jobs is the best possible way to gain skills, but your CV will get the side-eye if it shows anything else. I wonder how much of this is just path dependence, accidents of history, and no-one wanting to be the first employer to do something radical.

> But yeah I'm not really expecting companies to care, even though I think they should. To be honest I don't care too much about companies; from what I've seen, the vast majority of them are just crap ;) Thankfully there's open source.

Open source relies pretty heavily on companies, in my experience - either because a company decides to outright work on open source as a part of its primary business, or because it tolerates an employee who wants to contribute in doing so. You get some contributions from students, which are, uh, variable, and very occasionally a government grant, but most programming is being funded by corporations, by one route or another.