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Does a language need three ways to say "if x do y" ? or maybe there's an "unless !x do y" construct and it's 4 ways.

This to me looks like going out of your way to have lots of ways to do the same thing. I never cared for it in PERL either.

The argument that "it reads like English" is not one that I like much - The history of making programming languages read like English is a long succession of dead ends. Programming languages work more like formal maths proofs than they do like English prose. Rather make the language readable on its own terms.



> The history of making programming languages read like English is a long succession of dead ends.

There certainly have been notable failures, such as Applescript, but I find it hard to dismiss Coffeescript, Ruby, SQL and FORTRAN which have all been quite popular.


I like SQL, not for the english-ish keywords, but for the strong mathematical underpinnings.

You left out a notable example of Cobol - Which would you rather read: "Add 1 to someValue Giving someValue", or "someValue++" ?




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