There are many programming languages, each has it's strengths and weaknesses. And it's own syntax. I don't really understand what is it good for. Sure, each language has it's unique features, a strongly-typed language will have different syntax from a weakly-typed language, but I'm not talking about this "advanced" stuff, I'm talking about the very basics. And no better way to show what I mean than an example:
You already know I'm not a programmer, but I write PL/SQL code for the application, cmd and Perl scripts for administration purposes and this last semester I took Computer Vision and Image Processing courses and had a lot of assignments to implement in Matlab. Four languages, four different ways to write a comment. At some point I got confused with all the '%','#','--' tags (REM stands out more clearly), is this really necessary? Why should there be three(!) different ways to write a simple "else if" statement? Ok, let's say "elseif" somehow simplifies parsing, but "elsif"?! That's really ridiculous, it just looks like someone was trying to prove his creativity.
Why won't some standardization organization decide on how the basic syntax (comments, loops, if-then-else statements) should look like, and make - I don't really know how those things work - the vendors to have the next versions of their compilers to support the standard (unfortunately, backward compatibility is inevitable here)?
I don't really know if my idea is in any way feasible but this syntax confusion can get very... well, confusing.
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