Comment by grapevines

For example, a typical C program to compute the sum of a list of numbers includes three kinds of parentheses and three kinds of assignment operators in five lines of code

Let me take the opportunity to plug a new language which I have spent the last 5 months designing: github.com/jbodeen/ava

An ava solution -- 9 lines of code, and 1 set of parentheses -- would look like this:

  let rec sum list = 
    let are_we_at_the_end = 0 in
    let take_a_number_and_the_rest_of_the_list n list =
      add n ( sum list )
    in
    list 
      are_we_at_the_end
      take_a_number_and_the_rest_of_the_list 
    in

Maybe we need to zoom out of ancient languages into more intuitive paradigms if programming is to become easier for more people to access