Because the human is nondeterministic and the computer isn't. A computer, given a certain input, will always respond with a certain output. Humans, dogs, cats and most other animals don't do this. I'm finding it hard to understand why you have trouble with determinism vs non-determinism.

For the input "fruit flies like a banana", the computer must always EITHER ask for clarification OR assume what the sentence means. It cannot do ask for clarification some of the time and not others as a human will do.

No, it can't. In order to ask for clarity it first has to recognise that there is a 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001% chance of ambiguity. This would result in it always asking for clarity. A human is allowed to make mistakes in comprehension because the producer of the sentence might recognise that there was incorrect understanding. Then again, they might not. The computer doesn't have the luxury of taking the chance that there is no ambiguity.

Put differently - the human assumes that the other human will understand him or ask for clarification. Sometimes they are wrong in this assumption but no harm is done. With a computer: if the human takes the chance that the computer understands him OR will ask for clarification and the computer assumes a different meaning then there will be hell to pay. In essence, what you are saying is "given the sentence 'I once saw a deer riding my bicycle' I want the machine to sometimes ask for clarification and sometimes not, but the machine won't be told in advance which time to ask for clarification and which time to assume non-ambiguity." This is clearly impossible.

TLDR: You're asking a deterministic machine to perform non-deterministic actions; mathematically this is impossible, hence it will never be a reality.

I'll repeat myself too: You haven't figured it out, you're only convinced that you have. How can you know that I'm not saying "All fruit have the same trajectory as a banana?".

Your problem is probably lack of interaction with the real world. Go to court some day and watch proceedings of a trial - there is no such thing that a sentence is "obvious". In even the most trivial of defences the defence attorney is going to argue, sometimes successfully, that a much structured and mostly unambiguous piece of legislation is too vague to apply to his client.

No, you haven't.

Well, you thought that I meant "I was out on my bicycle when I saw a deer", but what I actually meant was "I was in my yard when a deer rode past on my bicycle". How the hell can you be sure that I meant the former and not the latter?

Nope, wrong again - worst case scenario is that the language interpreter does not figure it out, and doesn't realise that it hasn't figured it out!. Best case scenario in case of errors is the interpreter managing to figure out that it got the incorrect meaning.

Well, perhaps my emacs is broken then, because it lets me type anywhere and accepts the line as a command upon pressing enter. I can also scroll up and position the cursor on any line in the emacs window and press enter and it will accept that line as a command to execute, even if that line was not a command previously but the output of a command.

I'm afraid you are correct - I simply cannot see anything in that video which I cannot also do using a shell from emacs, and I'm way too lazy to make and post a video of myself doing emacs-as-a-shell. There's a slime video on youtube somewhere that shows the user using emacs exactly as the FA video shows, but with more functionality (and with software from over a decade ago).

It's hard to take a 'reviewer' seriously when they make goofs of such epic proportions, such as these. This blogger is obviously unaware that the IoT devices (along with a lot of the 'smart' devices) aren't going to be able to run ruby crap.

I've used emacs for that (editing 'uneditable' things in the buffer and then re-executing). See my post above - handy link here

I dunno about the rest, but for filesystem browsing you can use vim :e on a directory which vim will then let you navigate

If you want something better than :r! in vim, use emacs as a shell. I used emacs as a shell for years - you can cut-n-paste (multiple buffers), use the mouse to mark regions, save the entire session as a file, load a previously used session, search back, search forward, edit previous commands before running them, edit the output of previous commands (and then run them), execute the odd elisp expression (need a calculator quickly? It's built in), surf the web, read/send email, read usenet (or read slashdot), play rogue, elisa, snake or tetris, annotate previous commands, run multiple shells.

You still get all the normal stuff too - autocomplete, file and directory browsing, standard piping to forked processes, set/reset/unset variables, syntax highlighting of your shell, normal edit-compile-debug cycle, etc

(I've heard rumours that there's a text editor included with it too ;-)

That's even worse. 'Exceptions to the rule' are the worst type of program structure rules there are. At least in other languages there is a rule that always applies - a block is delimited by braces. In python you now have to say 'a block is delimited by indentation, except for when the block is empty, or when the interpreter is unable to figure out indentation. When is the interpreter unable to figure out indentation? The interpreter can always figure out indentations, except for when the code is filtered through some third party like web2py".

Frankly, I like the programming language rules to be simple, not filled with exceptions to a general rule. Python has many flaws (what the hell is 'print'? A statement? It acts like a function call but doesn't look like one, except if you're using python 3, or if you import 'print_function') but it's biggest has got to be the people who defend all the exceptions to the general rules. In this regard its closest relation is PHP, which also has general-rules-plus-exceptions-to-them up the wazoo.

Regardless, my original point still stands - python has a non-optional start-brace anyway. They should have just stuck with an actual brace for delimiting 'start of program block' instead of being hipsterish different and using a colon. Of course that wouldn't fix everything but it would be a start.

According to every single example given on the python documentation page, pass is used to end a block. It get's even more hilarious when you try embedding python into (for example) html pages like web2py does (I've been using web2py hence my discovery that python actually has to have an end brace of sorts).

'Pass' is not a 'noop', according to the documentation; it's simply an empty statement serving only a syntactical function. In other words, had python had an end-brace the way it has a start-brace, 'pass' would not be needed. The only use for 'pass' in python is to serve as an end-brace.

That's incorrect. Python already has open brace in the form of the ':'. The close brace is the keyword 'pass'. In addition to needing at least one brace, it also needs indentation. C-syntax only needs the braces, not the indentation so, technically, the python syntax is double the work, not half.

In python you need to put in the open brace ':' anyway, so why not just use '{' like every other language out there?

Not to mention that the first one is free, and before you know it you're hooked on your vendor for life.