this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Programming
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There can be a universal language in theory, but it's borderline impossible to achieve. Every domain has a different set of problems that it needs to solve, and language design involves tradeoffs that may make sense for one domain but not another. That's why I think language wars are silly, without context it's impossible to say which language is "better", because you could have different answers depending on what you're trying to do.
In the end you shouldn't be too concerned with it. There are lots of languages, but all of them fall under two or three paradigms where if you learn one language from that paradigm, your skills are mostly transferable.
It has been achieved by many different projects: The K framework is probably the closest to a universal language.
There’s also the possibility of formally defining code as an Agda spec which also allows that code to be converted to any other language without adding new bugs.
Then, you have category theory which is literally a universal language that describes ALL processes in a program.
Then you also have lambda calculus which does the same thing.
I mean if youre going to think of it that way any Turing complete language fits the bill, but what I mean by universal is a language you would reach for to solve any problem you have and it would be better than any other language. It's not a computer science problem it's a software engineering problem.