[skissane]

Programming languages are a bit like natural languages-they aren’t purely systems of formal rules, they are also usage patterns-there are lots of sentences which are formally correct English, but which few English speakers would ever construct-valid syntax and semantics, but stylistically and pragmatically abnormal. In the same way, a programming language is more than just the set of strings accepted by its compiler, it is a culture-language A may produce (in practice) more reliable code than B, not because of its feature set, but due to the cultural baggage that comes with it-but in a broader sense of “language”, that culture is part of the language too.