Guido van Rossum

And similarly, we're not going into the ones and zeros or machine language.

I would say a programming language is a list of instructions like a cookbook recipe that sort of tells you how to do a certain thing.

Like make a sandwich.

Well...

Acquire a loaf of bread, cut it in slices, take two slices, put mustard on one, put jelly on the other or something, then add the meat, then add the cheese.

I've heard that science teachers can actually do great stuff with recipes like that and trying to interpret their students' instructions incorrectly until the students are completely unambiguous about it.

Well, for lawyers, ambiguity certainly is a feature.

For plenty of other cases, the ambiguity is not much of a feature, but we work around it, of course.

What's more important is context.

No, but I imagine that my wife and my son interpret it very differently.

Yes.

Even though it's the same three words.

But imprecisely still.

Oh, for sure.

Nevertheless, the context is already different in that case.

That's a thing between programmers.

Because on the one hand, we always explain the concept of programming language as computers need instructions.

And computers are very dumb and they need very precise instructions because they don't have much context.

In fact, they have lots of context, but their context is very different.

But what we've seen emerge during the development of software, starting probably in the late 40s,