[utopiah]

What's interesting about it precisely that despite the equivalence (Turing machines and all that) the difficulty to do one thing is a language versus another is what make it prohibitively hard.

If one is "just" translating something that is idiomatic to a language to something that is not in another, it might take 100x for lines for codes in a way that is terribly hard to understand.

[consp]

I've had the unfortunate exercise of copying an API from pure android java to typescript because "they are similar". It goes against best practices and creates all kinds of weirdness resulting in a finished product which is almost the same but far enough away you could just as well have designed a better API in a few hours from scratch (the real complexity is in the backend of the code, not the interface fortunately). But requirements must be met.

[utopiah]

Funnily the conclusion is precisely why the whole idea of "just" giving specs and let <insert here trendiest marketing slang which tries to replace actual experts, developers or not> do the work is risky. If nobody challenges requirements from a manager or client who "just to get it done" you end up with actual work done... that is totally inefficient, potentially dangerous or just irrelevant.

PS: the <> used here could be the next HN thread I opened, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48047826