> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
What's so hard to believe? Everything you can write you can say, and you can show quite a lot that's difficult to describe in writing.
>Everything you can write you can say
That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl.
One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the telephone without confusion.
That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) ! (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r) R> (r from) etc.
So you could define an emoticon in FORTH like:
: ;-) WINK NOSE SMILE ; // Pronounced "winkie".Writing Perl is easy; reading it a few weeks later is the hard part. CPP I don't know much about… I was a sysadmin, not a programmer <@:) # clown-hat-curly-hair-smiley-face… or, part of a regex