> Most languages not directly influenced by C (new or old) simply don't have these bizarre issues
I don't agree. Lisp is "easy" to parse, but difficult to add structure to. Tcl similarly. Typeless languages are now out of favor--everybody wants to be able to add types.
Perl is a nightmare and probably undecidable. Satan help you if you miss a period in COBOL because God sure won't. FORTRAN is famous for it's DO LOOP construct that would hose you.
About the only language that wasn't hot garbage to parse was Pascal. And I seem to recall that was intentional.
> I don't agree. Lisp is "easy" to parse, but difficult to add structure to.
I have no idea what you mean by this, or how you think it relates to your original claim that having languages with a less terrible grammar than C++ or even C is some recent development.
> Perl is a nightmare
And it's pretty clearly C-inspired, even if it added lots of new syntactic horrors of its own invention. Also, it's late 80ies not early 70ies, so hardly a poster-case for languages becoming grammatically saner.
> About the only language that wasn't hot garbage to parse was Pascal.
In addition to Pascal and Lisp which you already mentioned Algol, Prolog, APL, Smalltalk are all famous languages from around the same time as C or significantly older and none of them are "hot garbage to parse". Neither are important 80ies languages like Postscript or SML. In fact the only significant extant 70s language I can think of from the top of my head that is syntactically noticeably more deranged than C and maybe even C++ is TeX.
> And I seem to recall that was intentional.
Well yes, why would anyone create a language that's really hard to parse for no discernible benefit? This is not the counterintuitive recent insight you make it out to be. If anything, the trend for popular languages would seem to become harder to parse -- none of the significant languages from the 2000s (like Swift, Julia or Rust) are anywhere as easy to parse as the languages I listed above.
Readers, please don't accept anything anyone writes about "FORTRAN", unless in a historical context. They probably last encountered the leading edge of the language 40 years ago.
Python is not typeless, it is strongly typed. Each value has one, precisely known type. Names may refer to values of different types, which is the "dynamic" part of pythons typing.
Javascript is weakly typed and most of its mayhem comes from there.
This is me being obtuse, but it seems like an appropriate time to ask... What is the difference? You mention that each value has one known type in a strongly typed language. Isn't this the case for Javascript as well? I'm having a difficult time trying to conjure a situation in JS where a value has multiple types (but I'm certainly no expert in JS).
It's a bit of a mixed bag and the terminology is difficult to grasp. I'd say Tcl and Bash are languages that only have strings ('stringly typed') that can be interpreted in a number of ways. JavaScript, PHP, and SQLite's SQL OTOH have lots of implicit type coercion---`1` and `'1'` can both act as a string, a number, or a boolean.
Python is considerably more picky in what it allows in which constructs; it does all the numerical typing stuff implicitly (so switching between integer, big int, and float happens most of the time without users even knowing about it), and b/c of backwards compatibility, coercions between numbers and booleans still happen (`True + 1` is still `2` in Python3.9). By extension, this includes empty lists, strings, and dictionaries evaluating to `False` in appropriate contexts.
I believe that in retrospect most of these efforts—coming up with a Just Works arrangement of strategically placed implicit coercions—that so much defined the rise of scripting languages in the 90s are questionable. Subsequently, many millions of USD went into making JavaScript faster than reasonable (on V8) giving its pervasive dynamic nature. Just bolting down types and banning any implicit coercions would have given it similar performance gains with a fraction of effort and a fraction of the resulting complexity. Backward compatibility could have been done with a pragma similar to the existing `'use strict'`.
I guess what I want to say is that strong and loose typing exists on a continuum much like human languages are never just of a single idealized kind.
I don't agree. Lisp is "easy" to parse, but difficult to add structure to. Tcl similarly. Typeless languages are now out of favor--everybody wants to be able to add types.
Perl is a nightmare and probably undecidable. Satan help you if you miss a period in COBOL because God sure won't. FORTRAN is famous for it's DO LOOP construct that would hose you.
About the only language that wasn't hot garbage to parse was Pascal. And I seem to recall that was intentional.