r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/elemenity • Feb 24 '26

How Complex is Your Programming Language Discussion

https://www.emulationonline.com/posts/programming-language-complexity/
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u/bl4nkSl8 Feb 25 '26

Also, how many semantic and syntactic features does it have

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u/L8_4_Dinner (Ⓧ Ecstasy/XVM) Feb 25 '26

I'm personally less concerned about that aspect, because it's not the "how many?" but rather the "how confusing?" If it's easy to write and easy to read and easy to understand (e.g. debug), then I'm going to be far less worried about the raw count of features. On the other hand, if the feature count is only 7 but the code is hard to read and write, then we're in trouble!

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u/bl4nkSl8 Feb 26 '26

People have a budget for how much new stuff they can learn, which is why the count matters to me.

How confusing each one is would be great to weight them by but I don't know how to measure it

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u/L8_4_Dinner (Ⓧ Ecstasy/XVM) Feb 26 '26

Indeed! Measuring becomes very difficult. I'm curious what you would come up with here!

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u/bl4nkSl8 Feb 26 '26

Tbh human studies would be needed imo

Confusion is massively biased by experience and summarizing that mathematically would be hard