What is Expressiveness in a Computer Language

[Raffael Cavallaro]

On 2006-06-14 15:04:34 -0400, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> said:

> Um... heterogenous lists are not necessarily a sign of expressiveness. 
> The vast majority of cases can be transformed to homogenous lists 
> (though these might then contain closures or OO objects).
> 
> As to references to nonexistent functions - heck, I never missed these, 
> not even in languages without type inference :-)
> 
> I don't hold that they are a sign of *in*expressiveness either. They 
> are just typical of highly dynamic programming environments such as 
> Lisp or Smalltalk.

This is a typical static type advocate's response when told that users 
of dynamically typed languages don't want their hands tied by a type 
checking compiler:

"*I* don't find those features expressive so *you* shouldn't want them."

You'll have to excuse us poor dynamically typed language rubes - we 
find these features expressive and we don't want to give them up just 
to silence a compiler whose static type checks are of dubious value in 
a world where user inputs of an often unpredictable nature can come at 
a program from across a potentially malicious internet making run-time 
checks a practical necessity.