>> Do you think we'll always have a huge number of incompatible >> programming languages? I agree with you that it's a fact of life in >> 2012, but will it be a fact of life in 2062? > > It will be a fact of life wherever Godels theorem is; which put > simplistically is: consistency and completeness cannot coexist. This > is the 'logic-generator' for the mess in programming languages. > Put in more general terms: > Completeness is an 'adding' process > Consistency is a 'subtracting' process > Running the two together, convergence is hopeless.
This isn't exactly correct. The incompleteness theorem basically shows that in a sufficiently expressive system, there are statements in the system that cannot be proven given the language of that system. We live with this already given the fact that the incompleteness theorem is closely related to Turing's halting problem. That doesn't indicate anything about the convergence of programming languages. It does say that we will need some form of unit testing or restricted subset simulation system as an adjunct to formal verification in most cases, until the end of time. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list