Comment High cognitive load (Score 1) 435
The best programming languages work like and use the same parts of the brain that reading and writing do. It is no surprise that the language of mathematics reads left to right, uses Latin symbols, and roughly follows European languages in grammar and syntax. (In certain parts of the Arab-speaking world, some mathematical expressions are written left to right, but this is not universal.)
As the syntaxes of programming languages become more elaborate, the cognitive load involved in programming increases. As other parts of the brain become involved, programming error rates increase, not to mention the common sense notion that completely learning the language becomes unachievable for most people and every programmer works with his or her own subset making code maintenance difficult.
C++ with its feature-packed templates makes people who love a language to have every concept from computer science packed into it happy, but it doesn't serve programmers and hence humanity very well.
The ideal programming interface is you telling the computer exactly what you want it to do in English, not the the opposite. We're decades away from an AI that can automatically write code, but making the programmer's link to the computer more difficult to convey unambiguous instructions seems to be going in the opposite direction.