Three programming languages walk into a bar...

28th Apr, 2025

…but unfortunately they’re Rust, GDScript and Kotlin, so none of them are allowed to drink. C++ laughs at them, and then has a heart attack.

Heads up that this one is mostly an (uninformed) infodump about programming languages and language in general, cause I’ve been thinking about that today.

Emphasis on UNINFORMED, okay? If you know anything about this topic, you may have a bad time with this one lmao.

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So I’ve been learning to program for nearly a year now, not counting the 2 or 3 attempts from years prior.

Today a friend sent me a link to a website full of exercises in the realm of bioinformatics programming, which is something I have 0 knowledge base in but which sounded fascinating, so I’ma fuck around find out maybe.

Unfortunately, they expect you to do the exercises in Python… which is not really that high on my list of language-learning priorities, given I’m already struggling through C#, GDScript, HTML/CSS, some basic amount of C++ eventually, and MAYBE one day some Rust.

Which really brings me to the point:

Why the fuck are there so many of these things?

One of my favourite concepts in language is that of conlangs, short for ‘constructed languages’. These are languages deliberately and purposefully created by humans, usually with pieces adapted from a variety of other languages; the most well-known one you may have heard of (that I know of) is Esperanto, developed in the 80’s and onwards by a Polish occultist of all people, according to google.

The idea is that we can eventually come up with the perfect language, right? Something that's simple to learn, easy to use, able to convey any possible concept in the universe, and does all this in a way that’s still pleasing to participate in.

Except this is probably a fruitless task - perfection is to language as infinity is to mathematics; it's a really helpful reference point for a bunch of shit, but you're not supposed to reach it. Otherwise we would all be speaking Esperanto by now¹, and also the universe would probably break.

Language is too complex and nuanced by nature for any one system to ever hit all those criteria perfectly, and even if one did you’d still have groups of people who would argue otherwise, simply due to "my language is better cause it’s MY language, actually" - a concept I entirely support, especially as someone living in a place that has many, many endangered local languages that deserve better.

Still. For some reason, I feel like we should have been able to accomplish it with programming languages. And apparently so do at least a few other people, given that we keep making new ones.

All programming languages are technically conlangs by definition - created by humans, quite recently and on purpose, to fulfill a certain task.

But the more time I spend learning about this, the more I realise a lot of those languages are mirrors of each other… but like, amusement park funhouse mirrors, all having a grand old time being an endless loop of slightly-warped versions of each other.

“GDScript is like C# but with some Python rules thrown on top”²

“C# is like C++ and Java… except for when it’s not”

“Java, not to be confused with Javascript, which is entirely different except for being called the same thing. For some reason.”

“And C++, which is just C but we made it better in every way, but also everyone thinks it kinda sucks”

...there's more, but you get the idea.

And to be perfectly clear, while I don’t think anything I just said is strictly wrong, it is absolutely all oversimplified. But still, it proves my point.

Which is that… hm, doesn’t this happen with natural spoken languages too?

French, Spanish, and Italian are all about 33% made from each other, ‘cause they’re all broadly Latin-based. The same is true for English and German, except that English has also borrowed a bunch of shit from those previous three³.

I can’t even count the number of languages that have dialect variants, just because some group of people starting doing something differently for some reason, and it stuck around till 500 years later. (...also looking at you, C-family languages).

So, when exactly does a conlang stop being a conlang? If the point is that it’s a deliberately-designed language, how far does it have to diverge from that original design until it’s… not, anymore?

This is pretty much what I think has happened to a bunch of programming languages. Some of them are still new enough that it probably doesn’t apply - Rust, for example, is still solidly in the grasp of its developers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an individual or at least a small group of individuals who know every single quirk of it, in and out.

But what about C? That shit has been continuously being changed for a few decades now. That’s a short time for a language, but a long time for human memory. How much of C was written by someone who no longer works on the language? Maybe they’ve moved on, passed away, or just forgotten about it.

Sure, somewhere there’s people who still use all the functionality of C, as a language. But is there any one centralised group of people who can claim to understand everything about it?

Hell, maybe there is. Like I said at the start, I’m horrifically under-informed and mostly writing this from vibes. But I wouldn’t be surprised.

So yeah. That doesn’t seem like a conlang to me anymore.

And y’know what? I think that’s pretty cool actually. Inconvenient, sure. But quite cool.

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Anyway. Perhaps I will learn a bit of Python soon, for the sake of this bioinfo thingy. Or maybe I’ll fuck around and write all my programs in GDScript, like I joked to a friend. Honestly it seems like a cool challenge - and understanding the language in a way that’s divorced from game dev methodology will probably only help me.

Maybe one day I’ll even get around to becoming a bit more fluent in all the other languages I’ve once upon a time half-heartedly tried; French, German, Japanese, Tagalog, Kaurna, and most recently Mandarin.

I feel like I should be the kind of person who can hold a conversation in something other than English, given how much I adore languages. Alas, there’s a lot of skills I should have⁴.

Toodles.